Hunt at World's End

Hunt At World’s End

Gabriel Hunt

AS TOLD TO NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

Strapping the shotgun fully across his back, Gabriel began climbing the statue’s leg, pulling his way up by hooking his fingers and toes into fissures in the stone. Another bullet struck near him. He forced himself to ignore it and keep climbing.

Moments later he heard Grissom’s voice directly below. “Leave them to me. You get up there and stop him—and bring me those gemstones!”

DeVoe stuffed the Colt into his belt and started scaling the statue’s other leg. And damn it, the man was fast. Gabriel kept climbing, as quickly as he dared. He was approaching the statue’s outstretched hand, which stood palm-up forty feet off the ground. If he could get to it—

He reached out for it, but it was still too far. He climbed another few feet and tried again, straining across the gap. He could feel the stone under his fingers…but could he get a solid grip? He clamped down with one hand and prepared to bring the other over—and as he did, his left foot slipped out of the fissure he’d braced it in. Desperately he swung his other arm across, biting down on the rough stone with his fingertips. His other foot slipped from its hold as momentum carried him across, and he found himself dangling from the statue’s hand, the jewel-filled vest pulling heavily on his arm. He tried to swing his legs up. His first try failed—not high enough. As he tried again, he glanced to the side and saw that DeVoe had reached the statue’s hip and was starting to inch his way over toward him…

Chapter 1

Gabriel Hunt had taken a lot of punches to the face over the years. He’d come to think of it as an occupational hazard, dealing as he often did with criminals, pirates, gangsters, brawlers and all kinds of thugs who let their fists do the talking, and he usually gave as good as he got. But this time was different. This was the first time the guy throwing the punches was wearing a big, sharp silver ring in the shape of a horned stag’s head.

The punch stunned him, knocked him back into one of the large elephant tusks flanking the fireplace of the Discoverers League lounge. The tusk wobbled on its base, and Gabriel, feeling wobbly himself, dropped to his knees. Blood trickled along his cheek where the stag’s horns had cut him. He looked up at the slender blond man standing over him in a gray houndstooth blazer and gray slacks. He was wearing a crooked sneer. Glancing at his hand, he wiped a spot of blood off his ring.

“We can continue this as long as you wish, Mr. Hunt,” he said. “I have nowhere else I need to be. But you see my friends back there? They don’t have as much patience as I do.”

Behind the blond man, three men clad all in black stood with guns in their hands. One revolver was trained on Wade Boland, the weekend bartender, where he stood behind the bar. The second was pointed at Clyde Harris, a retired cartographer in his seventies who came to the League every Saturday to partake of his two favorite pastimes, drinking and swapping tall tales. He sat on his usual barstool at the end of the counter and stared at the gun unblinking. Neither Wade nor Clyde looked particularly frightened by this turn of events, though they kept their hands dutifully raised above their heads.

But the third revolver was leveled at Katherine Dunlap, and she was a different story. The willowy redhead sat trembling at the table she’d been sharing with Gabriel before the blond man and his cohorts had stormed in and started waving their guns around. Her fingernails dug into the plush arms of the red leather chair, and her pale green eyes were as wide as soup bowls. It was obvious she’d never had a gun pointed at her before. Gabriel had only met her that morning, on his flight back from Brazil to New York City. Seated next to her in first class, he’d passed the hours answering her questions about his just-completed expedition along the banks of the Amazon, and once they’d landed he’d invited her back to the Discoverers League for a drink. She clearly hadn’t expected their date to end in violence. Of course, neither had he.

The blond man reached into the inside pocket of his blazer, pulled out a large, well-polished chrome handgun and leveled it at Gabriel. Gabriel eyed the gun unhappily. The three bouncer types he figured he could take even though they were armed. But this man was another matter. Compared to the other three he looked almost scrawny, but he punched like someone had taught him how, and he was holding his gun with a professional’s grip.

“I don’t have what you’re looking for,” Gabriel said, rubbing his jaw.

“I want you to think very carefully about what you do next, Mr. Hunt. I’d hate to have to tell my men to start shooting.” The man gestured around the lounge at the bookshelves filled with antique volumes and the display cases of artifacts, many of them fragile, all of them irreplaceable. “These beautiful things might get damaged. Bloodstains, you know. So difficult to wash off.”

“Gabriel,” Katherine pleaded, her voice shaking.

The man smiled. “You see? Your friend has a good head on her shoulders. I’m sure she would like it to remain there.”

Gabriel rose slowly to his feet.

“No more heroics, Mr. Hunt,” the man cautioned. “And no more lies. I know you were in the Amazon until this morning, and I know you brought the Death’s Head Key back with you. Just hand it over and we’ll go quietly.” He smiled slightly. “Its name notwithstanding, no one has to die over the thing.”

“Why should I give it to you?” Gabriel asked.

The blond man cocked his head and knit his brow. “Why? Because I am the man with the gun, Mr. Hunt.”

“Why do you want it?” Gabriel said. “It’s not that valuable. It’ll fetch maybe five, six grand on the black market, if you’re lucky. It hardly seems worth your time.”

The blond man stepped nearer. This close, Gabriel got a good look at the man’s eyes and could see the brutality he concealed beneath his veneer of civility. The man opened his mouth to answer, then changed his mind and swung his Magnum, slamming the heavy butt into Gabriel’s jaw. Gabriel’s head snapped back. At least this time he managed to stay on his feet.

“The key,” the blond man repeated.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He tasted blood and spat red-tinged saliva onto the carpet. “You better hope I never see you again.”

The man cocked the Magnum. “You will never see anyone again, Mr. Hunt, if you don’t hand over the key.” And when Gabriel failed to do so: “For heaven’s sake, Hunt, what difference does it make to you? What were you planning to do with it, stick it in one of these cases? Photograph it for National Geographic? Give it to the Metropolitan? What a colossal waste. You don’t even know what the key unlocks.”

“And you do?”

The blond man leveled the barrel of the Magnum at Gabriel’s forehead and said, “Five.”

“Tell me,” Gabriel said. “Tell me what the key opens.”

“Four.”

“Gabriel, for God’s sake,” Clyde muttered from his barstool. “My ice is melting. Just give the man whatever he’s looking for, and I’ll buy you and the lady a round.”

“Three.”

The blond man swung the gun to point it at Katherine. Her hands shot up as though they might be able to deflect a bullet. “Two.”

“Gabriel!”

“One—”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “All right. Just…put that thing away.”

The blond man took the gun off of Katherine and swung it to face Gabriel instead.

Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt. The Death’s Head Key hung on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted it over his head. The blond man snatched the heavy bronze key with his free hand and held it up, eyeing it with satisfaction.

No one knew how old the Death’s Head Key was. It had been given its name in 1581 when the explorer Vincenzo de Montoya found it on a trip through Asia and noticed its bow was shaped like a skull, with concavities where the eye sockets might have been and a diamond-shaped groove between them. No one, not even de Montoya, knew what it unlocked—but whatever it was, Gabriel could guess from the look of the thing that it was no simple door. Most keys had a single blade that fit into the keyway of a lock, but the Death’s Head Key had three, one straight and the other two flanking it at forty-five-degree angles. De Montoya had reportedly worn it around his neck as a good luck charm, but it hadn’t kept up its end of the bargain. His luck ran out when he disappeared during an Amazon expedition a few years later, and the Death’s Head Key had been lost with him.

Lost, until Gabriel found it, still dangling from the broken neck of de Montoya’s skeleton at the bottom of a deep pit in the rain forest.

Now, watching the blond man stuff the Death’s Head Key in his pocket, Gabriel couldn’t help feeling it was about to become lost once again.

“Very thoughtful, Mr. Hunt,” the blond man said. “You’ve saved the custodians of this establishment quite a bit of mopping.” He backed slowly toward the lounge door, keeping his gun leveled at Gabriel. “Let’s go,” he said, and the three thugs holstered their revolvers and exited before him. The blond man gave Gabriel a final nod and disappeared through the doorway.

When he heard the front door open, Gabriel followed at a run, passing Hank, the League’s elderly doorman, where he lay slumped unconscious on the floor.

In the street outside, a pair of doors slammed on a gunmetal gray Cadillac and it peeled off, tires squealing against the asphalt. Gabriel raced out into the street and ran half a block after them, but they shot through a red light and vanished in the distance.

Gabriel walked back to the League building and into the lounge, where Wade was already dialing the police from the phone behind the bar. “Button up, young man,” he said, aiming a finger at Gabriel’s chest. “There are women pres—oh, hello, yes, I’d like to report an incident.”

There was only one woman present, and Gabriel lowered himself into the chair beside her, fuming. For weeks he’d meticulously traced de Montoya’s path through the Amazon, sweating through the jungle heat and all the days of false starts and backtracking, and for what? So the artifact he’d worked so hard to recover could be stolen by some skinny blond thug with bad taste in jewelry?

He looked up and noticed Katherine was still trembling. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

She stood slowly and walked to the bar, grabbed the scotch glass out of Clyde’s hand and downed it in a single gulp. Then she returned to the table where Gabriel sat. She put a hand on his arm.

“So,” she said, and Gabriel could tell she was trying to keep her voice steady. “Does this happen every time you take a girl out for drinks?”

Gabriel touched the cut on his cheek and winced. “Not every time.”

Katherine patted his arm. “Don’t call me,” she said. Then she turned and walked out. A moment later they all heard the front door shut.

“The police are on their way,” Wade said, handing Clyde another scotch. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to Clyde as well. When he saw Gabriel watching the transaction, he said, “We had a bet.”

Gabriel frowned. “What kind of bet?”

“I bet Clyde twenty bucks you never lose a fight.”

“I could have told you otherwise,” Gabriel said. “What’s the other twenty for?”

“I also bet him that you always get the girl.”

Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said. “And sorry about…” He waved his hand in a circle, indicating the room’s two overturned chairs, the painting that had been knocked askew, the shattered decanter still in fragments on the floor.

“How long have we known you, Gabriel?” Clyde asked, sipping his scotch. “We’re used to it by now.”

Chapter 2

Gabriel sat on the table in an examining room at Lenox Hill Hospital with the noise from the emergency room seeping in through the closed door. He fidgeted, the stiff paper that covered the table crinkling under his weight. The police officer standing by the door fidgeted too. He tapped his pencil against his notepad like he was marking time.

“This is ridiculous,” Gabriel said. “I told you I’m fine.”

“It’s standard procedure following an assault,” the officer said. He was a few inches shorter than Gabriel, maybe five-nine, with curly, close-cropped hair and a thin mustache. The nametag above his badge read jackson. “Most people appreciate being taken to the hospital after they’ve been beaten, slashed and pistol-whipped.”

Gabriel hated hospitals, especially the strong, antiseptic smell of ammonia that seemed to permeate every square inch of them. It was the same smell he remembered from the hospital in Gibraltar when he’d gone there in the early weeks of 2000 in the hopes of identifying his parents’ remains. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had been on a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean when their ship disappeared. No visuals, nothing on the radar, just gone. Three days later it had appeared again out of nowhere, not a living soul on board, only the dead bodies of three crew members. Soon after, more bodies began washing ashore—crewmen, passengers, more than three hundred in all—but a dozen or so never did. It had been a bad few weeks, looking at corpse after corpse and not knowing each time whether to hope he wouldn’t recognize it or that he would. In any event, he never did. And nearly a decade later, the smell still got to him, still gave him an uncomfortable feeling of bad news and unfinished business.

“So this man,” Officer Jackson said, looking at his notes. “About your height, six feet, blond hair, slim build, gray blazer and slacks. And you say he was in charge of the others, the three other men?”

“That’s right. He gave the orders. The others didn’t talk at all.”

“Have you ever seen him before?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No. Never.”

“Are you sure? It’s easy to forget a face.”

“I tend to remember the men who hit me.”

“Have there been a lot?”

Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “One or two.”

“Well, you say this one knew your name, knew where to find you and knew you were in possession of this…this key he took from you.”

“That’s right.”

“So you think he’s been following you, or what?” “I’ve been out of the country for the past several weeks. I doubt he could have followed me where I was. But someone must have gotten word to him about what I brought back—one of the locals, possibly, or someone on the expedition.”

Jackson nodded and scribbled in his notepad, though that answer put it well out of his jurisdiction. “There anybody you can think of who might have it in for you?”

Gabriel sighed. “How much time do you have?”

The officer flipped his book shut, capped his pen. “Not enough,” he said. “You ever think of changing professions, Mr. Hunt? Maybe something a little safer, like firefighter or undercover narcotics officer?”

“I’d miss the flexible hours,” Gabriel said.

The door opened then, and a woman in green scrubs stepped in. She had straight black hair tied back in a ponytail, deep brown eyes and smooth skin the color of caramel. She clutched a clipboard to her chest and nodded at Officer Jackson. “Can you give us some privacy?”

Jackson said, “All right. Mr. Hunt, we’re going to put your assailant’s description out there and try to get a lead on him.” He didn’t sound too optimistic. “If you think of anything that might help, call the precinct, okay?”

“Of course,” Gabriel said.

Officer Jackson left, closing the door behind him.

“I’m Dr. Barrow.” The woman scanned the papers on her clipboard. “Gabriel Hunt, is it? Okay, Mr. Hunt, let’s take a look at you. Would you mind taking off your shirt?”

Gabriel frowned. “Really, Doc, I’m fine. This isn’t necessary.”

“That’s what they all say. Then one day they collapse in a grocery store and it’s our fault. So. Your shirt.”

Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off and tossed it onto the empty chair by the door. “I got hit in the face, nowhere else,” he said.

“You think that can’t put stress on your neck, your windpipe, your heart?” Dr. Barrow took the stethoscope from around her neck, put the buds in her ears and placed the metal disk against his chest. “Breathe for me.”

Gabriel breathed.

“Again.” She moved to his other side and he felt the cold metal press against his back. “Once more.”

He kept breathing and she kept shifting the stethoscope around. Then the metal went away and he felt her finger tracing a line along his shoulder blade. “This looks like a scar from a knife wound,” she said.

“Yes, well, there’s a reason for that,” Gabriel said.

“And is this—” she probed a little lower “—from a bullet?”

“Grapeshot.”

“And this?” Her finger pressed lightly at the base of his spine.

“Spear,” Gabriel said.

“Good lord,” Dr. Barrow said. “I’d say the cut on your cheek is the least of your worries.”

“You should see the mark a saw-toothed Aztec dagger left on my thigh. It’s a beauty.”

“Maybe some other time,” she said.

“Yeah,” Gabriel sighed. “I’m getting a lot of that today.”

When Gabriel left the hospital, his brother Michael was waiting for him outside, pacing on the sidewalk, his straight, sandy hair blowing in the breeze. He pushed his round, wire-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Well, well, well. I guess I am my brother’s keeper after all.”

“You didn’t have to pick me up,” Gabriel said. He touched the bandage on his cheek. It protected the four stitches Dr. Barrow had given him. She’d told him he was lucky his jaw hadn’t fractured. Then she’d recommended rest, aspirin for the soreness and, if possible, significantly fewer gun butts to the face.

“Come on,” Michael said. He put a hand on Gabriel’s back and led him to the shiny black town car waiting at the curb. He opened the door for Gabriel, then slid into the backseat next to him.

Up front, an older man with a salt and pepper mustache looked at Michael in the rearview mirror and asked, “Home?”

“Yes. Thanks, Stefan.” The driver nodded and pulled out into traffic. “I hope you don’t mind coming back with me,” Michael said, turning to Gabriel. “It’s just that I feel better about our security at the Foundation than what they’ve got at the Discoverers League. Those men might come back for you.”

“They already have what they came for,” Gabriel said. “I’m sure they’re long gone by now. Back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said, “but better safe than sorry.” He looked out the window. “You know I really wish you’d stop all this and just come work with me at the Foundation.”

“Doing what?” Gabriel asked. “Answering mail? Reading grant applications? I’d go stir crazy within a week.”

“You’d get fewer guns pointed at you. Not the worst trade-off, Gabriel.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Gabriel said.

The car pulled up in front of the marble entryway of the Hunt Foundation’s five-story brownstone on 55th Street and York Avenue, in the heart of Sutton Place. They got out, and as Stefan drove the car off, Michael fished his keys out of the pocket of his tweed jacket and opened the door. Inside, he pressed a code into an alarm panel on the wall, which beeped in response. Satisfied, he led the way up the stairs, past the offices on the first two floors of the building and up to his triplex apartment.

He turned on the lights, big hanging chandeliers that illuminated an enormous library lined with bookcase after bookcase. Beginning with the numerous volumes their parents had amassed, Michael had compiled the largest collection of obscure and ancient texts since the Library of Alexandria, a collection Gabriel himself had made use of many times. A red leather couch sat in the middle of the room, with a wrought iron, granite-topped coffee table in front of it and a long polished oak desk off to one side. The pages of a manuscript lay stacked on the table: the Oedipodea of Homer, translated by Sheba McCoy. Good for her, Gabriel thought, remembering how close they’d both come to getting themselves killed after discovering the lost epic in Greece. Have to read it one of these days, find out how it ends.

At the far end of the library, an enormous stuffed polar bear, rearing with its mouth open and its teeth bared, towered above a small breakfront bar. “Would you like a drink?” Michael asked, opening the breakfront and pulling out a bottle of Glenfiddich.

“Definitely.”

Gabriel sat on the couch. Beside Sheba’s manuscript, there was an open cardboard box with the Hunt Foundation’s address written on one of the flaps in black marker. He reached inside and dug through shredded paper until he felt something dry and brittle. He pulled the object out. It was a shrunken, mummified human hand. With six fingers.

“Gloves, gloves, gloves!” Michael yelled. He nodded anxiously toward the box of disposable latex gloves sitting on his desk. “You know better.”

Gabriel dropped the hand back in the box. “Sorry.”

Michael carried over a glass, handed it to him.

“None for you?” Gabriel said, sipping.

“In a moment.” Michael went over to his desk and opened his laptop. “I just need to check on something.” He clicked the mouse a few times, and then a cloud of disappointment darkened his features.

“What is it?”

Michael slumped in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands. “I was hoping I’d have an e-mail from Joyce Wingard. We gave her a grant for a research trip to Borneo and she’s been there since August. She was checking in with me every day, and then three days ago the e-mails stopped.”

“How well do you know her? Maybe she just ran off with the grant money.”

Michael stared at him. “You don’t recognize the name? Joyce Wingard. Gabriel, she’s Daniel Wingard’s niece.”

Daniel Wingard. There was a name he hadn’t heard in years. Wingard had been a professor of archeology and cultural anthropology at the University of Maryland and a good friend of their parents. And Joyce Wingard…now it came back to him. The last time he’d seen Joyce he’d been fifteen, and she’d been, what, seven? Their parents had taken them to spend the weekend with the professor and his niece at Wingard’s home on the shore of the Potomac. Gabriel remembered an impatient little girl with blonde pigtails. During dinner, she’d called him stupid and dumped a bowl of potato salad in his lap.

“Joyce Wingard,” Gabriel said. “What the hell is that little girl doing in Borneo?”

“Working toward her Ph.D., Gabriel. She’s thirty years old.”

“I guess she would be, at that,” he said. Thirty years old and probably still a terror. “Does she have any field experience?”

“She didn’t need any. This was just supposed to be a research trip.”

“What was she researching?”

Michael got up and walked to a bookcase. He scanned the spines, pulled a weathered tome off the shelf, and brought it back to the couch. He sat next to Gabriel and opened the book. The title page said ANATOLIAN RELIGION AND CULTURE.

“Have you heard of the Three Eyes of Teshub?” Michael asked.

“I’ve heard of Teshub. Storm god of the Hittites, right?”

Michael turned the pages until he found the photograph he was looking for: a stone carving of a bearded man with a conical headdress standing on an ox’s back. Beneath the photo was the caption TESHUB IDOL, 15TH-13TH CENTURY B.C.E. “According to legend, Teshub gave the Hittites a powerful weapon called the Spearhead to protect them from their enemies. But the Spearhead was so powerful that Teshub had second thoughts. He came to believe that even his beloved Hittites lacked the wisdom to use such a weapon responsibly, so he took it away from them and hid it until some unspecified future date when three armies would meet in battle to decide its fate.” He flipped the page and handed the book to Gabriel.

On the next page was an illustration of three enormous jewels. “Looks like an ad for DeBeers,” Gabriel said.

Michael shook his head. “Those are the Three Eyes of Teshub. Supposedly, they were three gemstones that together were the key to using the Spearhead—or possibly to locating it, or perhaps to retrieving it from where it was hidden. The stories varied.”

“Don’t they always,” Gabriel said. He downed the rest of his scotch.

“Documents from the period say that when Teshub hid the Spearhead away, he called up three winds to blow the gemstones in three different directions, scattering them as far apart as possible, so that they would never be found. People have looked for them, of course. No one has found any evidence that the Three Eyes of Teshub actually existed.”

“But Joyce…?”

“Joyce discovered incomplete rubbings from a pair of tablets she thought might shed some light on the legend. The original tablets are buried away in the archives of Borneo University. She applied to us for a grant to cover the cost of her trip.” Michael returned the book to its spot on the shelf. “Her application might not have leapt to the top of the stack otherwise, but…” He went back to his desk, checked for new e-mail once more. Nothing. “But how could I say no to Daniel Wingard’s niece? And it wasn’t much money. I figured no harm could come of it, a trip to a university library.” He dropped into his chair. “And now she’s missing. I’ve tried calling her, I’ve called our man down there, I’ve asked people at the university if they’ve seen her—nothing. Who knows what sort of trouble she might have gotten herself into? I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything had happened to her because of me.”

Gabriel set his glass down on the table, pushed the box containing the mummy’s hand to one side. “If you’re really worried about her, Michael, I can go down there and look around a bit. Shouldn’t be too hard to find her.”

Michael shook his head firmly. “No. Bad enough that she’s missing, think how I’d feel putting you in danger as well.”

“Putting me in danger? You’re kidding, right?” Gabriel said. “I don’t think a week’s gone by since Joyce Wingard was in pigtails when I wasn’t in danger. It’s what I do.”

“And you know I’ve never been comfortable with it,” Michael said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be the cause of it.”

“You wouldn’t be the cause,” Gabriel said. “Joyce Wingard would. Besides, I haven’t been to Borneo in ages. About time for a trip back.”

“You might not recognize it,” Michael said in a quiet voice. “Half the rain forest’s gone.”

“All the more reason to go now, before they cut down the other half.”

“Gabriel…”

“She’s probably fine, Michael. I’ll probably find her in the museum archives, elbow deep in notes and files, with her phone turned off and no idea how long it’s been since she last e-mailed you.”

“But what if you don’t?” Michael said.

Gabriel thought of the headstrong, impish, pigtailed girl chasing him around her uncle’s picnic table, squealing with laughter as she tried to catch him. He remembered her showing him her toys, how she took special pride in one in particular, a Barbie dressed in safari gear and an explorer’s pith helmet. He remembered her playing tag in the woods with Michael, who’d been only a couple years older than her. Joyce had fallen, skinned her knee on a rock, and wouldn’t let anyone pick her up and carry her back to the house. She’d insisted on walking, even with blood trickling down her leg, and shouting that she could do it herself, didn’t need anyone’s help.

But this time maybe she did.

“Then you’ll be glad I went,” Gabriel said. “How soon can you have the plane ready?”

Chapter 3

It was Monday afternoon local time when the Hunt Foundation’s jet touched down at Sepinggan International Airport in Balikpapan, on the southern coast of Borneo. In the airport’s waiting area, small suitcase in hand, he scanned the crowd. Michael had arranged for a man named Noboru to meet him here. Formerly Japanese Intelligence, now employed by the Hunt Foundation, he’d been Joyce’s contact on the tropical island. If anyone was in a position to turn up any clues as to what had happened to her, it would be Noboru—though he hadn’t found any yet when Michael had spoken to him from New York.

The waiting area was crowded with people holding signs written in Indonesian and Malaysian Bahasa, Kadazandusun, Iban, Bidayuh, Arabic and a dozen other scripts. Despite the air-conditioning, the room smelled of sweat and spices. Small vendor huts were set up along the walls, selling dumplings, pork buns and bowls of noodles.

A hand fell on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Mr. Hunt?”

He turned. A man of about fifty stood behind him. He had long, shaggy black hair, Asian features, a jawline spotted with dark stubble and a face deeply wrinkled from the sun.

“Mr. Noboru?”

The man nodded and shook Gabriel’s hand. “Your brother told me you were coming. Welcome to Borneo. I just wish your visit were under better circumstances. Here, let me get that for you.” He took Gabriel’s suitcase and led the way outside. The moment Gabriel passed through the sliding glass doors into the open air, an oppressive humidity pressed down on him like a heavy, moist blanket. He followed Noboru to the parking lot, where hundreds of cars gleamed in the sweltering sun. Noboru threw the suitcase into the backseat of a mud-spattered, topless jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Gabriel joined him up front. “Where are we headed?”

“Inland, toward Central Kalamitan,” Noboru said. “Where I dropped Joyce when she first arrived. It’s a long drive, but we ought to be there before nightfall, Mr. Hunt.”

“Mr. Hunt was my father,” he said. “And these days it’s my brother. I just go by Gabriel.”

Noboru nodded. “Make yourself comfortable.” He started the engine, stepped on the gas, and the jeep lurched out of the parking lot with a great roar and a plume of black exhaust. Gabriel grabbed the roll bar as Noboru sped through a series of hairpin turns to get them onto the highway.

The farther they got from Balikpapan, the more it felt like they were traveling back in time. The highway devolved into an unpaved dirt road and the tall apartment buildings of the city were replaced by wooden shacks surrounded by dense jungle. They passed a line of women walking alongside the road, dressed in the brightly dyed linens of the indigenous Dayaks and balancing water jugs and baskets of rice on their shoulders. A few minutes later, Gabriel saw another woman kneeling beside the road and hammering something into the ground. As they drove past, he saw it was a wooden post with the skull of a goat lashed to the top.

“What was that?” he asked.

Without slowing down, Noboru took both hands off the wheel to light a cigarette. “She’s warding off evil spirits,” he explained. He took a deep drag and gripped the wheel again. “The farther out you get from the cities, the more superstitious the people become. It’s beautiful here, loveliest place on earth—when I came here after I retired from the service, I never considered going anyplace else. But you wouldn’t believe how much people here cling to the old ways. They don’t trust anything new. Or anyone. It’s taken five years for them to start trusting me. Most of them think outsiders bring bad luck.”

“Joyce was an outsider,” Gabriel said. “Did anyone give her any trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Noboru said. “I only saw her the one time, when I picked her up at the airport and dropped her off at the guesthouse we’re going to. It’s strange. I was supposed to drive her to the hotel your brother arranged for her, but she said she’d made her own arrangements to stay in this local hostel. She said she wanted to be closer to the jungle.”

“Why?” Gabriel asked. “She was here to study some materials at the university.”

“I know—that’s what was strange. I told her your brother had put me at her disposal, that I was supposed to take her wherever she needed to go, do whatever I could to help with her research, but after I dropped her off, she never called me. Not once. I guess she didn’t need any help.”

Gabriel thought back to the incident with the skinned knee. “Or thought she didn’t,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr.…Gabriel. She was a nice girl, very friendly, easy to get along with. Reminded me a lot of my daughter, actually. She’s in university in Singapore now—my daughter, I mean. I don’t get to see her very often; it was nice to see a girl her age, with the same sort of personality…” He fell silent for a moment. “I was upset when your brother told me that Joyce was missing. I hope you’ll be able to find her.”

“Any idea what might have happened?”

Noboru weighed his words carefully before speaking. “As beautiful as it is here, the country has a dark side. People get kidnapped all the time by bandits and held for ransom, especially out in the jungle.”

“As far as we know, there hasn’t been any ransom demand,” Gabriel said.

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Noboru said. “If they get someone they think no one will pay for, they kill them. Or worse, for women. It would be better if she’d broken her leg somewhere in the jungle—then at least she would die of starvation, or exposure. Much better than what the bandits would do to her.”

Gabriel knew Noboru was right about the country’s bandits—but he couldn’t bring himself to hope she was lost in the jungle. Borneo was the third largest island in the world. He wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. “Michael told me he called the university to see if she showed up, and they said they never saw her. Did she tell you if she was planning to go anywhere else? Any particular part of the island?”

“No, we only talked in general terms. She was very interested in the island’s history. She had a lot of questions.”

Gabriel could picture her putting Noboru through the third degree, squeezing every bit of information out of him that a budding cultural anthropologist would find interesting.

“The only thing she asked that was about a specific place,” Noboru continued, “was right before I dropped her off, she wanted to know if anyone had ever found an ancient cemetery in the jungle. I asked her if she was thinking of the Bukit Raya nature preserve—they have a cemetery nearby that’s fairly old. But she said no, she meant in the jungle itself. I told her unless the orangutans had started burying their dead, there weren’t any.” Noboru shook his head. “She didn’t look happy with the answer, but what could I say? There aren’t any cemeteries in the jungle. Not that I know of, anyway.”

Gabriel reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheet of paper Michael had given him, a grainy color blowup of Joyce Wingard’s passport photo. She’d come a long way from the seven-year-old girl Gabriel had met in Maryland. The blonde pigtails were gone, replaced with shoulder-length hair she wore pulled back in a tight ponytail. She still had the same wide smile, but a little more jaded, a little more cynical. Her eyes were crystal blue, her chin and cheeks slender. She’d become a beautiful woman.

What have you gotten yourself into? he thought.

The sun was a hazy red ball sinking toward the horizon when Noboru turned off the road onto a narrow dirt lane. Thick, leafy branches crowded the path on either side, pressing inward as if the foliage were trying to reclaim the road. Birds shrieked and cried, and unseen animals shook the branches above them. Half a mile in, the road widened and they found themselves entering a small village. Wooden houses with rusty corrugated metal roofs were arranged roughly in a circle around an open central area marked by a single, small pagoda. The villagers stopped what they were doing and stared at the jeep as it passed. A man filling a water bucket from a hand pump stiffened when he saw them, then spat and touched his forehead twice, once above each eye. It reminded Gabriel of someone protecting himself with the sign of the cross.

Noboru brought the jeep to a halt in front of a ramshackle two-story building. Most of the paint had peeled off long ago, leaving small patches of coppery red stuck to the flat concrete walls. Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat and pulled two items out of his suitcase. The first was a holster, which he strapped around his waist. The second was a Colt .45 Peacemaker, fully loaded. He slipped the revolver into the holster.

As they stepped out of the vehicle, the front door burst open and an old woman ran out shouting and waving a dirt-smeared shovel. Gabriel tensed, but Noboru stepped in front of him.

The old woman stopped running but continued gesturing with the shovel and shouting.

Gabriel had picked up many languages in his journeys around the world, but Bidayuh wasn’t one of them. It was close enough to Indonesian Bahasa that he was able to make out a word or two, but that was all. He leaned over to Noboru. “What’s she saying?”

“Her name is Merpati,” he said. “This is her guesthouse. She wants us to leave. She says your presence here as an outsider is bad luck and will bring evil spirits.”

Gabriel frowned. It didn’t make sense. If Joyce had made arrangements to stay here, if it was a guesthouse used by visitors to the island, why would this Merpati react so negatively to their arrival? This wasn’t a matter of bad luck or evil spirits, Gabriel decided—something had happened, something that had changed this old woman’s mind about letting foreigners through her door.

Gabriel held up the passport photo. “Ask her when she saw Joyce last.” Noboru spoke, and Merpati lowered the shovel, answering in a quick and anxious voice. She passed her hand over her face, from forehead to chin. Though Gabriel didn’t recognize the words, the fear in her expression was unmistakable.

Noboru nodded, then turned to Gabriel. “You’re going to love this. She says ghosts came in the night and took her.”

Upon hearing the word “ghost” in English, Merpati nodded and passed her hand over her face again.

“Ghosts without faces,” Noboru went on. “She says they took Joyce into the jungle. This was a few nights ago.”

The old woman pointed toward the far end of the village, where the houses thinned and the jungle rose in a thick green wall beyond them.

“Does she know where these…these ghosts would have taken her?” Gabriel said.

Noboru asked, and in response Merpati said something curt, biting her words off fiercely.

“She says,” Noboru translated, “the girl is dead now, trapped among the ghosts in the land of the dead. If you go after her, you will be trapped too. Become a ghost yourself.”

Gabriel put the picture of Joyce away in his jacket pocket. “I’ll take my chances. Will she at least let us see Joyce’s room?”

Noboru asked and Merpati chewed her lip. When she finally replied, Noboru said, “For fifty Ringgit she’ll let us up—that’s about ten dollars. It’s a lot here.”

“Hell,” Gabriel said, digging in his pocket, “I can do better than that.” He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, unfolded it and held it out to the old woman. She eyed him warily, then snatched it out of his hand. She stared at it briefly, crumpled it in her palm and hid it away in a pocket in her torn shift. She muttered something out of the side of her mouth.

“She says we can’t stay long. It’s a full moon tonight, and apparently that’s when the spirits are at their strongest. She doesn’t want you hanging around and bringing the ghosts back.”

“No, we definitely wouldn’t want that. Listen,” Gabriel said, “you should go. It’s getting dark, and you’ve got a long drive back. I can take it from here.”

“You kidding?” Noboru said. “I like my job. Nice hours, good benefits. How long do you think your brother would let me keep it if I left you in the middle of the jungle by yourself?”

“I’m not a Ph.D. student on her own in Borneo for the first time,” Gabriel said. “I can handle myself.”

“Against ghosts?” Noboru asked with a grin. “Two’s better than one against ghosts.”

“Against practically anything,” Gabriel acknowledged. “All right. Just stay close and don’t wander off. One missing person is enough.”

“You don’t have to worry about me. Didn’t I just tell you I’m not going anywhere?”

“You armed?”

Noboru lifted his pants leg to reveal a long knife strapped to his calf.

Gabriel nodded. “I guess that counts.”

Merpati led them to the door of the guesthouse. Gabriel noticed a short wooden post had been hammered into the ground by the door, and atop it was a goat’s skull, like the one they’d seen on the road. Merpati’s attempt to protect the house from the evil spirits that took Joyce, presumably. The old woman brought them inside, past a kitchen that smelled like spicy stew and steamed pork, and up a wooden staircase to the second floor. The warped steps creaked loudly under their weight. Barring the culprits actually having been ghosts, which Gabriel was inclined to doubt, there was no way they could have sneaked up these stairs to take Joyce without being heard. Which suggested that whoever had taken her must have found another way in.

On the second floor, a long corridor ran the length of the building, five doors lined up along one side. Each door they passed was open, each room empty but for a neatly made bed with a short dresser beside it. Nothing on any of the beds, nothing on any of the dressers.

“The other boarders must have left after Joyce was taken,” Noboru said.

“Can you blame them?” Gabriel said.

Merpati stopped in front of the last door, which was the only one that was closed. She pulled a ring of long, heavy keys out of her pocket, unlocked the door and pushed it open for them. Gabriel and Noboru walked past her into the room. The old woman hung back, reluctant to set foot inside. She shouted something at Noboru. Gabriel didn’t need him to translate that time. Merpati wanted them to finish quickly and go.

Looking at the state of Joyce’s room, Gabriel could understand Merpati’s reaction. Everything was in a shambles. The dresser’s drawers had been dumped, the bed stripped, the mattress slashed. Clothing, books and personal items were scattered everywhere—Gabriel nudged a hairbrush with his foot. On the far wall, the window was shattered, the broken glass taped over with a bedsheet. He crossed to the window, pulled the sheet aside, and stuck his head through, taking care to avoid the jagged edges. This must have been how they’d gotten in. It was probably the way they’d taken her out, too, maybe with a ladder or a rope, after tossing the room and its contents.

“What do you think they were looking for?” Noboru said.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “But it’s clear they weren’t here just for Joyce. You don’t have to slash open the mattress if you just want her.”

Noboru squatted to sort through the books on the floor. Gabriel did the same to search the items that had been dumped from the drawers. It was mostly clothing, but under a crumpled pair of pants he found Joyce’s passport and beside it an old-style analog wristwatch, similar to the one Gabriel himself wore. Its face was cracked, the hands stopped at 3:10. “Well, now we know what time it happened,” Gabriel said, showing Noboru the broken watch. Then he lifted the passport. “And we can rule out one possibility. If it had been bandits, they would never have left a U.S. passport behind.”

“No,” Noboru said. “You can get more on the black market for one of those than you can for most hostages.”

“So if not bandits, who?”

“You ruling out the ‘faceless ghosts’ theory?” Noboru said, then before Gabriel could answer he raised one hand. “Hang on. This looks promising.” He pulled a composition notebook out of the pile. “It’s her expedition journal.” He began flipping through the pages. “Let’s see, arrived in Borneo, met Mr. Noboru at the airport. Oh look, she says I seemed ‘interesting.’” He kept going, scanning lines of cribbed handwriting quickly. “Looks like she spent most of her time exploring the fringes of the jungle. And look at that.” He tapped the bottom of one page with his forefinger. “She writes here that she thinks she’s being followed.”

“Let me see.”

Noboru passed Gabriel the journal. The entry in question was dated one week back.

Probably imagining it, but…I think someone was following me at the Malawi River today. Not someone I’d ever seen before. But everywhere I went in the marketplace, this guy was there. Kept turning away and pretending to look at pottery or whatever when I caught him staring in my direction. Didn’t look Bornean, which made it kind of hard for him to disappear in the crowd. One of those bandits N warned about? But he didn’t look like that at all. Merpati’s opinion when I told her about it was just that “it’s dangerous for single women to wander around without a man.” Well there’s a newsflash. But I’m damned if I’m going to hide in my room.

The Malawi River? What was she doing there? What was she doing anywhere but the university archives?

Gabriel flipped ahead, scanning the pages for any more mentions of being followed, but didn’t find anything until the final entry. It was dated Wednesday, the same day Michael had gotten his last e-mail from her. Joyce’s handwriting was noticeably different, more uneven and hurried:

Another guy following me today at the marketplace in Tarakan. Definitely not the same man, though same type—white guy, maybe five-eight, five-nine, and too damn interested in everything else around him anytime I turned to look at him. This one had curly hair and a beard. White shirt, brown pants. He followed me for a good ten minutes, before I finally lost him in the crowd. Damn it. Could this have something to do with SOA?

Gabriel looked up from the page. “SOA. Any idea what that might be?”

“School of the Arts? Society of Actuaries? State of Alert?”

Gabriel walked back to where Merpati stood wringing her hands in the doorway and showed her the page in the book. He pointed to the letters “SOA.” She shook her head and started talking loudly, gesturing back toward the stairs.

“She wants us out,” Noboru said, unnecessarily.

Taking Joyce’s passport and journal, Gabriel followed Noboru out of the room. Merpati escorted them downstairs and all the way back outside, as if she didn’t trust them to leave on their own. She loudly locked the door behind them.

Night had settled over the village, barely cooling the sticky, humid air. A full moon glowed over the treetops, its round face covered briefly by a passing cloud. All around them, light seeped out of the windows of the village houses, bright and steady from those with generators, dim and flickering from the ones that used oil lamps. As Gabriel walked to the jeep, a man across the way finished hammering a post topped with a goat skull into the ground in front of his house, then spat, touched his forehead twice and went inside. The door slammed, and Gabriel heard a heavy bolt slide into place. He glanced around and noticed goat skulls had been posted in front of every house he could see. Not a great place to be a goat.

Gabriel reached into the jeep’s backseat, unzipped his suitcase and slid Joyce’s passport and journal inside.

“So now what?” Noboru asked, coming up behind him.

“They took Joyce into the jungle,” Gabriel replied. “So that’s where we’re going.”

“It’d be safer to wait until morning.”

Gabriel reached into the suitcase again and pulled out a flashlight. “For us. Not for Joyce.”

Noboru puffed out his cheeks and blew air. Then he nodded.

Gabriel reached into the suitcase again. “That knife of yours looks handy, but…” He pulled out a second revolver and passed it to Noboru. “Maybe you’d better carry one of these, too.”

Chapter 4

Noboru had his own flashlight in the glove compartment of the jeep, and together they entered the jungle at the edge of the village, twin beams of light bouncing in front of them. Moonlight filtered through the trees and glistened on the thick leaves all around. They moved forward, the blanket of undergrowth on the jungle floor clinging to their feet as they went. Where the foliage was too thickly knotted to pass, Noboru cut away the vines and creepers with his knife, swinging the keen blade machete-style, the revolver jammed in his belt.

The high whine of insects filled the night air, and the rustling of leaves; the beam of Gabriel’s flashlight revealed tree frogs and geckos clinging to the trunks and branches in their path. Mouse deer whose heads didn’t reach higher than the tops of Gabriel’s boots fled before them through the underbrush. Clicking beetles scurried away into tiny holes amid the twisted roots.

“Tell me if you see any tarantulas,” Noboru muttered.

“Why?” Gabriel asked.

“So I can get the hell away from them. I hate those damn things. Always have.”

Gabriel tilted his flashlight down to shine it along the ground. No tarantulas in sight. “Remind me sometime to tell you what happened to me in Chile.”

“Not if it involves a tarantula.”

“Not a tarantula,” Gabriel said. “A whole nest of them. Chilean flame tarantulas.”

Noboru shivered. “I never, ever want to hear that story.” He stopped suddenly and bent down, shining his flashlight at some thin branches poking out from a tree at knee level. “Hold on. Look at this.”

Gabriel came over, adding his light to Noboru’s. “What have you got?”

The branches were snapped, their bent tips all pointing in the same direction. Something heavy had passed—or been dragged—through them.

“It’s too big to be from squirrels, too high for mouse deer,” Noboru said.

“Monkeys?”

“Too low. This was done by people.”

Gabriel straightened and shone his flashlight in the direction the snapped branches pointed. The jungle seemed to stretch on forever, tree after tree, vine after vine, forming an impenetrable net of vegetation. After five days, the signs remaining of Joyce’s passage through the jungle would be few; that was more than enough time for rain and wildlife activity to conceal the trail. But there should still be some signs. It just meant they’d have to be that much more vigilant to spot them.

Gabriel started walking again, following the direction of the broken branches. Several yards farther on, his flashlight beam located something at the mossy base of a thick tree.

“There.” He hurried to the tree. More branches were snapped and bent like before, but this time there was also a piece of torn fabric stuck on the sharp end of a twig. Gabriel brushed aside a long-horned beetle that had made the cloth its bed and plucked it off the branch. It was filthy, covered in mud, but under the dirt he saw a tight weave and a blue and white pattern. It felt like cotton. “It’s clothing,” he said. “Piece of a shirt or a dress, maybe.”

“Well, I can tell you we’re definitely not the first people to pass through here,” Noboru said, his voice low. He pointed his flashlight at the ground ahead of them. Past the tree, the vegetation had been trampled flat.

They followed the trail deeper into the jungle. They passed whole tree trunks covered with swarms of ants and termites. Stick insects clung to nearby leaves and waited patiently for their chance to snatch up prey. Above their heads, an enormous tropical centipede with red mandibles and spiky legs sprouting like daggers from its segmented body crawled along a thick branch. Gabriel saw Noboru look away, disgusted, as they passed beneath it. It wasn’t just tarantulas, then. Gabriel was beginning to think the jungle was no place for him.

Ahead, Gabriel could just make out a dim orange light flickering between the leaves, growing brighter as they moved along the trail. They proceeded cautiously. The path, he saw, came to an end at the edge of a wide clearing. Just shy of the edge, while they were still hidden by a screen of trees, Gabriel dropped to the jungle floor and pulled Noboru with him. They switched off their flashlights, hid behind a low barricade of fallen branches and took in the sight before them.

Six tall wooden posts jutted from the ground around the perimeter of the clearing, forming a rough hexagon. Each post was topped with a shallow stone bowl of burning oil. These were the source of the flickering orange light they’d seen through the trees.

At the far end of the clearing was a crude but fairly large hut constructed of wood and what appeared to be scavenged pieces of metal. There were no windows in the one wall of the hut they could see, only a single door, which was currently closed.

And at the center of the clearing, directly in front of the hut, were two massive, bent tree trunks bowed in a double arch over a ten-foot-wide circular stone that rested on the ground like a giant manhole cover. He’d seen a stone cover like that once before, in the rain forest of Guatemala; there it had protected the waters of a sacred well. He wondered what this one was protecting.

But that wasn’t the main question on his mind, because of what he saw hanging above the stone, suspended from the bent tree trunks by a pair of heavy metal chains: a wooden cage.

And it looked like there was a figure lying across the bottom of the cage.

Just as he was about to stand up, movement by the side of the hut caught Gabriel’s eye. A man emerged from the shadows. As he walked out into the light from the bowls of flame, Gabriel saw he was wearing a white robe and carrying a tall metal pole. A curved sword hung from his belt. He had the robe’s hood pulled over his head and over his face he wore what looked like a clay mask in the shape of a skull.

One of Merpati’s faceless ghosts. Gabriel and Noboru exchanged glances.

The man walked under the cage and struck the end of the pole against the wooden slats. The figure inside the cage didn’t move. Gabriel couldn’t help wondering if it was Joyce—and if so, whether she was alive or dead, merely asleep or too sick or weak to move. Stopping at the edge of the circular stone slab on the ground, the man slid one end of the pole into a socket beside the slab and turned the pole until it audibly locked in place.

Noboru clutched suddenly at Gabriel’s arm. Gabriel turned—and saw a fist-sized tarantula creeping across the branches directly in front of Noboru’s face. Noboru’s eyes widened and even in the dim light Gabriel could see the blood drain from his face. His jaw dropped open.

Gabriel clamped a hand over Noboru’s mouth before he could make a sound.

The tarantula continued picking its way along the branch and disappeared into the underbrush. Gabriel glared at Noboru, who nodded, and then he let go. Noboru swallowed hard and took a few deep breaths.

When Gabriel looked up again, the man in the robe and the skull mask was standing under the cage with his back to them. He’d picked up a long stick from the ground and was poking it up between the wooden slats at the person inside the cage, who stirred and moaned quietly. Whoever it was, she or he was still alive. Gabriel signaled to Noboru to stay put, then pointed to himself and the man in the clearing. Noboru nodded to show he understood, which was more than Gabriel could say for himself. He feared his gestures may have conveyed the impression that he had more of a plan than he actually had.

Gabriel rose quietly to his feet. The skull-faced man still had his back to them. Gabriel crept toward him, one hand on the butt of his Colt in case the man turned too soon. Luckily he was too intent on waking the person in the cage to notice Gabriel coming up behind him. Gabriel wrapped one arm around the man’s neck. He meant to put him in a sleeper hold but the man spun quickly, slipped out of Gabriel’s grasp, and went for his sword. Moving fast, Gabriel threw a punch, connecting with the mask, which shattered. The face below was pale, with bushy eyebrows and a scraggly beard—definitely not Bornean. It looked like it could be the man Joyce had described in her last journal entry. He opened his mouth to shout for help, but Gabriel dropped him with a second punch to the face.

Gabriel dragged the man’s body into the trees where it wouldn’t be seen, then returned to the cage. Up close, he saw that the chains it was hanging from were attached to gears mounted at the top of the arched tree trunks. He peered up through the mossy slats along the bottom of the cage. Lying inside was a woman in a torn blue-and-white shirt and dirt-smeared khaki shorts. She’d been gagged with a cloth tied around the back of her head, and had ropes tying her hands behind her back and binding her ankles together. She was facing away from him.

“Joyce?” he whispered.

She started. She struggled to sit up, then realized the voice was coming from below her and turned to lie on her stomach. Even with her face smeared with dirt, her hair tangled and matted, Gabriel recognized her and he felt a surge of relief.

Joyce squinted down at him, studying his face, then her eyes spread wide. “Ayiel Unn?” she said around the gag.

That took him by surprise. He hadn’t expected her to recognize him after so many years. He certainly wouldn’t have recognized her without the passport photo.

“Yes,” Gabriel whispered. He glanced at the hut. No one seemed to have heard them. Not yet, anyway. “Noboru’s here, too. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“Obo-oo eeyah?” Noboru’s here?

Gabriel looked around for some way to lower the cage. “Are you okay? Will you be able to walk?”

She nodded. “Uh-ee. Ay’ll ee ere oon.” Hurry. They’ll be here soon.

A wooden door was set in the side of the cage, locked with a heavy metal padlock. Maybe he could bash it open, or find a way to pick it, but first he had to figure out how the hell to get up there. He’d have to climb one of the trees and make his way down the chains…

Voices sounded from the hut, a sudden clamor that sounded like the “Hear, hear!” at the end of a convocation. He looked toward the door and saw a crack of light spill out as it slowly swung open. “Hang tight,” he whispered. “I’ll come back for you.”

Joyce’s eyes widened again and she shook her head vehemently, tried to say something, but Gabriel put a finger to his lips and ran for the shadows at the edge of the jungle. He slid behind a tree as a procession of robed men emerged from the hut. He counted twelve in total, then quickly amended it to thirteen when a man who was clearly their leader or high priest or something appeared behind them. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a skull mask or a white robe. His face was bare and he wore a red tunic with curling gold designs sewn into the fabric. A rectangular headdress of the same colors perched atop his head and in one hand he held a staff tipped with a bronze blade that gleamed in the reflected light of the flames.

The men gathered in a semicircle around the stone on the ground and the metal pole planted upright beside it. They started chanting in a language Gabriel didn’t recognize. Not Bidayuh, which he simply didn’t speak—this was a language he had never heard before.

He tried to catch a glimpse of Noboru, but from where he was now it was too dark to see the spot where they’d been hidden.

The chanting grew louder, more insistent. One of the masked men stepped up to the metal pole and pulled it toward him like a lever. Gabriel heard a grinding of gears underground and the circular stone began to slide sideways, revealing a hole beneath. No, it wasn’t a well this time. The bright orange flames of a roaring fire licked up out of the darkness.

Gabriel’s eyes went from the fiery pit to the cage hanging on chains directly above it. Not good. He drew his Colt.

The men in the skull masks looked up at the cage. Gabriel noticed a change in their chanting. He may not have spoken the language, but he knew the sound of a climax approaching when he heard it.

He needed to stop this before either the cage or its contents got dropped into the flaming pit. But how? There were too many men for him to take on at once. What he needed was a diversion, something to distract them before they could start lowering the cage…

A gunshot rang out. Gabriel saw a muzzle flash in the darkness and the skull-faced man who’d pulled the lever cried out, clutching his stomach where a red stain had blossomed on the white robe. He fell—but as he fell, he caught the lever in the crook of his arm, yanking it the rest of the way.

The cage began slowly lowering, chain link by chain link, toward the fire pit.

Gabriel’s heart slammed into his throat. Not good. Not good at all.

The men in skull masks were shouting angrily, drawing their swords, pointing toward the area where the gunshot had come from. Where Noboru was hiding.

And from inside the cage came the sounds of Joyce shouting through her gag and kicking at the wall of the cage as it dropped closer to the flames.

Chapter 5

The high priest shouted orders and the men in the skull masks ran toward Noboru’s hiding place. Gabriel gripped his Colt and charged out of the woods. He was tempted to try to take down some of the men from behind, even up the sides a bit, but instead he headed straight for the lever. He had to stop Joyce’s cage from going into the fire before he could deal with this wouldbe army of the dead.

As he ran, the cage continued its descent toward the flames. On either side of the bowed tree trunks, massive stone counterweights slowly lifted into view, giant tablets carved with hideous, leering faces.

The high priest turned suddenly—Gabriel figured the man must have heard his racing footsteps or spotted him out of the corner of his eye. He frantically barked out a new order and pointed. Four of the masked men broke away from the group heading for Noboru and moved to intercept Gabriel, shouting and swinging their swords above their heads.

Gabriel pulled the trigger of his Colt on the run, knocking the closest of the charging swordsmen off his feet. He smashed mask-first into the ground.

Shots rang out from Noboru’s hiding place as well, as the remaining men reached the edge of the jungle. Two of them fell before the others swarmed into the trees.

Gabriel kept racing for the lever. There were three men still coming at him, and the fastest of them caught up with him when he was two yards short of his goal. The man swung his sword in a wide arc, and Gabriel desperately ducked below it. He swung out with his free hand, burying it deep in the man’s belly. But the next swordsman was right behind him, leaping over his fallen comrade’s body as the man collapsed.

Gabriel fell back, the descending blade narrowly missing him. He continued retreating as the swordsman aggressively bulled forward. The nearest of the posts planted around the perimeter of the clearing was just steps behind him—he could feel the heat from the flames on his back—and he ducked behind it as the blade swept toward his head again. The sword buried itself deep in the wood of the post. As the swordsman tried to yank his blade free, Gabriel threw himself against the post, striking it as hard as he could with his shoulder. The bowl at the top wobbled, then toppled over, showering the man with burning oil. He screamed as his robe burst into flames. He relinquished his sword and staggered blindly away, leaving a flaming trail behind him.

The last of the four swordsmen immediately took his place. He slashed at Gabriel, who leapt to one side, trying to circle around toward the lever again. He heard the gears turning and the links of chain slowly paying out; he could hear Joyce’s muffled screams from within the cage. There was no more time. He swung his Colt up and put a bullet through the forehead of the man’s mask, snatched the man’s sword out of his hand as he fell, and ran all-out for the lever.

As Gabriel neared it, he saw Noboru in the distance, being dragged from his hiding place. The older man was empty-handed; one of the robed men had seized his gun. But Gabriel knew that didn’t mean he was unarmed. Demonstrating that he’d kept up his combat training even in retirement, Noboru twisted suddenly out of their grasp and in the same fluid motion pulled the long knife from his ankle sheath. He drove it into one masked man’s chest, grabbing the man’s sword with his other hand as he drew his own blade out. When another of the men rushed him, Noboru blocked the man’s thrust with the sword and slashed across his throat with the knife. A spray of blood stained the man’s mask a dark red. Seeing two of their fellows fall in quick succession, the others hesitated, took a step back. Noboru pressed his momentary advantage, letting loose with a martial shout and rushing them with both blades swinging mercilessly.

Gabriel, meanwhile, slid to a stop beside the lever, holstered his Colt, and—with Joyce’s cage less than a half dozen feet above the fire and sinking lower—reached out to take hold of the metal pole. But before he could close his fist around it, a sword sliced toward his arm. He jumped back, turning to face the second swordsman, who’d apparently recovered from the punch to the midsection that had taken him down earlier. Gabriel swung his sword around with both hands on the hilt, but his opponent parried and came back with another thrust. Gabriel knocked the blade aside, then stretched out a leg and kicked the lever back into its upright position. Behind him, the chains halted their descent and the massive counterweights shuddered to a stop. Gabriel swung his sword at his adversary’s neck, but the man met his blade and, kicking out with one sandal-clad foot, shoved the lever forward again. The gears groaned back into motion and the cage started to lower once more.

They chopped at each other, the clash of metal ringing in Gabriel’s ears as he struggled to push the swordsman back. He maneuvered around until the lever was at his back and as his opponent’s blade swept through the air beneath his chin, Gabriel fell backwards against the lever, shoving it to the “off” position. Then he let go of his sword, spun, and grabbed the lever in both hands. He twisted it mightily and yanked it out of its socket. Swinging with all his strength, Gabriel smashed it into the side of the masked swordsman’s head, like a home run hitter aiming for the fences. The pole may not have been a regulation Louisville Slugger, but it packed plenty of heat. The man staggered back, back, teetered on the edge of the flaming pit—and was gone, his passage marked only by a momentary rush of flame and ash from below.

Gabriel looked to the side. The wooden cage was no longer overhead—it was right next to him, and Gabriel could look directly through the side of it into Joyce’s terrified eyes. She was on her knees, and her forehead was glistening with sweat. For that matter, so was his. Her eyes went wide suddenly as she stared past him. “Ook ow!”

Something slammed into him from behind, knocking him to the ground. He rolled onto his back and saw the high priest standing above him, staff in hand, his eyes flashing with rage. He spun the staff so that the bronze blade at its end was pointing at Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel rolled, and the blade sank into the ground behind him. He grabbed the sword he’d dropped and scrambled to his feet.

The high priest pulled the blade free and charged him, holding the staff like a bayonet. Gabriel parried with the sword, knocking the staff aside, but the man kept coming, striking at him with the side of the staff and trying to bring the blade around for another thrust. Gabriel knocked it aside each time, stepping backward to buy some room, until he felt the intense heat of the fire pit at his back. He knew he must be close to the edge—he could feel the heat melting through the heels of his boots.

The high priest thrust his staff at him again, and this time Gabriel swung his sword down from above, driving the bronze blade to the ground. As it jabbed into the dirt, Gabriel lunged forward, grabbed hold of the shaft, and pulled it toward him, wedging one foot against the base to serve as a fulcrum. The high priest made the mistake of clinging to the staff stubbornly—as Gabriel had hoped he would—and went up in the air as Gabriel dragged the staff toward him. By the time the high priest realized he should have let go, it was too late: Gabriel had pivoted, and the man was dangling by his hands above the pit.

“Stop!”

The voice came from twenty yards away, the opposite end of the clearing, and Gabriel looked up to see Noboru with a curved sword at his throat, each of his arms held in the tight grip of one of the skull-face acolytes.

“I’m sorry, Gabriel,” he called. “I tried—”

“Silence.” The man holding the sword to his throat shouted to Gabriel: “If you let him drop, your friend dies. Both of your friends, and then you.” His accent was thick—but Gabriel had no difficulty understanding what he was saying.

What Gabriel was having difficulty doing was keeping the staff from sinking in his arms. The high priest wasn’t a small man, and that damn headdress must have weighed fifteen pounds by itself. He tried not to let the strain show in his voice. “And if I don’t?” Gabriel called. “If I let him go? Free, I mean. Let him go free, not let him go into the pit.”

There was some angry muttering among the robed men, but the one who had spoken silenced them with a gesture. “If you let him go, we let you go.”

“You first,” Gabriel said. The man didn’t lower his sword. “You’d better make up your mind fast. I don’t know how much longer he can hold on.”

The high priest’s hands were clutching and re-clutching the staff sweatily. He cried out in the unrecognizable tongue they’d spoken in earlier and instantly the men released Noboru’s arms. The one holding the sword reluctantly lowered his blade.

“Get over here,” Gabriel shouted and Noboru darted over, covering the distance between them in seconds. He took hold of the shaft of the spear just above where Gabriel was holding it, and together they dragged it over till the high priest was over solid ground again. He let go and collapsed in a heap. His robes were singed and smoking.

“Now, get out of here,” Gabriel shouted, pulling his Colt again. He aimed it at the high priest, who scuttled backward on his hands and heels. “Go.” He trained his sights on one after another of the men till they’d all faded into the darkness of the jungle. The sound of their footsteps receded as they fled.

“I feel terrible,” Noboru said, “I should never have let them—”

“Feel terrible later,” Gabriel said. “Right now I need you to keep an eye out for them, make sure they don’t come back.”

He raised one foot carefully and smashed his heel against one of the cage’s upright slats—but instead of the wood splintering as he’d hoped, the cage as a whole swung farther out over the pit. Inside, Joyce moaned.

“Careful,” Noboru said, glancing over. “That chain’s going to give.”

He was right: as the cage swung, the heavy chain shifted ominously in the narrow track that held it, and one end of the cage dipped precariously toward the flames.

There was no more time. Gabriel holstered his gun and jumped for the nearest link of the chain. It burned his palms as he caught it but he held on and pulled himself up until he was standing on the uneven upper surface of the cage. It was slanting like a barn roof and hot as hell. He could only imagine what it felt like for Joyce inside. Straining to keep his balance, he made his way to the far side—the side the cage’s door was on—and lowered himself hand-over-hand till he was level with the padlock. Letting go with one hand, he pulled his Colt and struck the padlock with its butt. The lock didn’t budge.

“Come on,” he muttered and tried again.

The cage shook and dropped some more. He could feel the fire beneath him. Through the bars, Joyce stared at him. “Oo ih,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Oo ih!”

What?

Oh. Shoot it.

Gabriel said, “Move back,” needlessly—Joyce had already sensibly crawled to the farthest corner she could reach—and took aim. The hasp of the lock flew apart as a bullet plowed through it. He yanked the remnants loose and tossed them aside, then unlatched the door and stuck an arm inside. Joyce tumbled into it and he hoisted her up onto his shoulder. The cage shifted again, dipping lower.

“Gabriel!” Noboru shouted. “The chain!”

Gabriel didn’t look to see what the chain was doing. It wouldn’t be anything good. Instead, he jumped, pushing off against the cage. They were in midair for a moment, and then there was solid ground beneath them, and they were rolling across it, Joyce beside him.

He looked back and saw the cage swinging wildly toward the trees. Above it, the chains groaned and, as the cage started swinging back, jumped their tracks. The giant wooden box came crashing down, smashing into the edge of the pit. It broke into pieces, the largest of which plunged directly into the fire; but the next largest kept going, spinning through the air toward them, its jagged edges aimed directly at Gabriel’s face. He fell forward, taking Joyce to the ground beneath him, and the deadly slab of wood passed overhead, just inches away. It caromed off the trunk of a tree seconds later.

Gabriel looked down at Joyce. She was grimacing through the gag. He tugged the filthy strip of cloth out of her mouth, and she took in a huge breath gratefully.

Gabriel rolled off her, got to his feet and helped her stand with one hand under her arm. Noboru had retrieved his knife and used it now to carefully cut through the ropes at her hands and feet. She rubbed her wrists, grimacing in pain.

“We’d better get out of here,” Noboru said. “They could come back at any time.”

But Joyce wasn’t listening. She turned to Gabriel. “How could you? How could you leave me in that cage and walk away? I could have died!”

“You still might,” Gabriel said. “Now get moving.”

Chapter 6

They made their way out of the jungle warily, but didn’t encounter any of the robed men. Gabriel led the way back into the center of the village and banged on the door of the guesthouse until a window lit up on the top floor. Merpati leaned her wizened face out to see who it was, frowning until she spied Joyce. She exclaimed then and disappeared back into her room. There was the muffled sound of footsteps racing down the stairs, and then the front door burst open.

Merpati rushed out and clamped her skinny arms around Joyce, whispering nonstop in Bidayuh. There were tears in her eyes, Gabriel saw. She seemed reluctant to release her, and even when she did, she held onto one of Joyce’s wrists as she led them inside. Joyce made a remark to her in the same language and a smile appeared on Merpati’s face. She said something and tugged Joyce into the kitchen.

“She’s going to cook something for us,” Joyce said. She eyed the small pile of vegetables and spices Merpati was assembling on the counter with a look only five days in a cage can inspire. “She says we should clean up first.”

Joyce led the way upstairs, followed by Noboru; Gabriel brought up the rear. He saw Noboru wince once as they climbed, when he brushed the banister with his right arm. The sleeve of Noboru’s shirt had been sliced open and looking closer Gabriel saw a still-wet streak of blood below.

“You’re hurt.”

“Not too bad. You should see the other guy.”

“I did,” Gabriel said. They reached the landing and turned toward Joyce’s room. “Did they teach you how to fight like that in Intelligence?”

“Surprised that a man my age can still take care of himself?”

“If you couldn’t,” Gabriel said, “you’d never have made it to your age.”

Joyce opened the door to her room. “Damn it,” she said, eyeing the mess.

“Worse than you remembered?” Gabriel said.

Noboru crossed to the bed and sat down to inspect the wound on his arm. “Do you have any bandages?”

Joyce shook her head. She picked up a white tank top from the floor and handed it to him. “Here, use this.” Noboru nodded his thanks and tied it around his arm.

“Who were those people in the jungle?” Gabriel asked her.

She squatted in the middle of the room and started pulling up one corner of the carpet. “They’re a cult, quite an old one. The Cult of Ulikummis,” she explained. “They’re mostly Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian by birth, but they’re spread out all over the world. Their presence here is actually a good sign. It means I’m close.”

“There’s nothing good about those people,” Noboru said.

“Ulikummis,” Gabriel said. “I’ve heard that name before.”

“One of the gods of the Hittite Empire,” Joyce said. “Ulikummis was the enemy of the storm god Teshub.”

Joyce folded the rug over, clearing a portion of the wooden floor beneath it. She started digging her fingernails into the floorboards. Noboru shot Gabriel a curious look.

“When the Hittite Empire collapsed in 1160 B.C.,” Joyce continued, “most of their people stayed put in what is now Turkey, but some of the religious orders fled north into what became Russia. Over the years, they gave the appearance of assimilating into the local culture, but they kept the old religion alive in secret cults. Most of these cults are gone now—all but one, really. The Cult of Ulikummis was pretty ruthless and basically they slaughtered all the others. Thousands of people were killed, many of them in ritual sacrifices like the one they were planning for me. The only reason I’m still alive is that they were waiting for the full moon before performing the sacrifice.”

“Why did they come after you in the first place?” Gabriel said.

Joyce blew a lock of blonde hair out of her eyes. “They thought I had something that properly belongs to them.”

“Do you?” Gabriel said.

“If they didn’t find it.” She located the floorboard she’d been searching for and pried it free. She reached into the hole in the floor. “Ah.” Joyce straightened, pulling something wrapped in an oilcloth out of the hole. She stood, put the object down on top of the dresser and gently unwrapped it.

In the folds of the oilcloth was a flat, circular object with intricate designs cut into its golden surface. It wasn’t a single solid piece but rather seemed to be made up of several concentric rings set one inside the next, with a protruding bit in the center, like a handle or a knob. The sharp, angular designs along the outer rim were cuneiform symbols, Gabriel realized, and had been cut all the way through, like stencil letters—light shone through them from underneath. The bit in the center was shaped like a starburst, each of its three arms a different length and each tipped with a small jewel. Two of the gemstones were green, one red.

“This,” she said, lifting it carefully out of its swaddling, “was known as the Star of Arnuwanda.” The gold glittered in the lamplight.

SOA. The acronym in Joyce’s journal entry.

“Arnu—?” Noboru said.

“Arnuwanda the Second. He was king of the Hittites around 1320 B.C., and supposedly the last custodian of the Three Eyes of Teshub. Shortly before he died, he had this device constructed to his specifications. Then he had the man who made it for him executed. He didn’t trust anyone to know how it worked, for fear that they might use it to find the Three Eyes.”

Noboru looked over at Gabriel. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“Some,” Gabriel said. “The Three Eyes of Teshub are these legendary jewels that were supposed to unlock an ancient hidden weapon of the Hittites. But the jewels themselves were also hidden, or lost, or something.”

“Cast to the three winds,” Joyce said, “by Teshub himself. But the Star is supposed to show their resting place. Teshub spoke to Arnuwanda in a dream and told him how to build it.”

“Thoughtful of him,” Gabriel said. “Where did you find the thing?”

“Not me. My uncle. He dug it up in Turkey last month. He didn’t trust the locals he’d hired, he thought they might try to steal it for the gold, so he shipped it to me for safekeeping.”

“And you brought it to Borneo,” Gabriel said. “Does he know?”

“Not exactly.”

“How not exactly?”

“He thinks I’m still in the States. I asked Michael not to tell him about the grant.”

“And Michael agreed?” Gabriel asked.

She shrugged. “I told him I didn’t want to worry Uncle Daniel, that he’d be anxious for no reason. Remember, Michael just thought I was going to be studying in a library.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “You sure fooled everyone.”

“Are you going to tell me you’ve never told a lie when you’ve been on the trail of something big?” she said. She returned to the oilcloth and pulled out a second item, a folded piece of paper. She kicked aside a pile of clothing to clear a space on the floor, then opened the paper and spread it out. It was a copy of an ancient map of the eastern hemisphere with penciled-in grid lines crisscrossing over the crude drawings of continents and landmasses, dividing the map into little squares. Cuneiform symbols similar to the ones on the Star appeared in many of the squares.

“This is an enlargement of Arnuwanda’s map,” Joyce continued. “The cult has one too. It’s easy enough to get, you can copy it out of any book on ancient Anatolian history. Without the Star it’s nothing. But with the Star…here I’ll show you. Hold your flashlight above the Star and shine it down.” Gabriel pulled the flashlight from his belt and switched it on. He positioned the beam to shine through the Star so that its shadow fell on the map.

Gabriel smiled. “The symbols.”

“Exactly,” Joyce said. The beam passed through the cuneiform symbols around the perimeter of the Star and projected them onto the map. “It’s Nesili, the language of the ancient Hittites. Now check this out.” She gripped the starburst shape at the center of the device and turned it. It clicked along a hidden track and as it did the outer perimeter rotated in the opposite direction. She kept turning it, apparently trying to align the symbols from the Star with those on the map, but the ones on the map were printed in a different order—they didn’t match.

“How confident are you,” Gabriel said, “that it’s the real Star?”

“Oh, it’s real,” Joyce said. “This is just Arnuwanda being a sneaky bastard.” She kept turning the starburst slowly, one click at a time. “Obviously it’s a puzzle of some kind, and for the longest time I had no idea what the key could be. But I had a lot of time to think in that cage.”

Gabriel kept his eyes on the map, trying to find a pattern to the symbols.

“The legend says that when Teshub scattered the Three Eyes around the world, he gave each for protection to a different one of the three natural elements,” Joyce continued. “Earth, water and…well, no one’s sure what the third one is. In the earliest translations of the legend, they couldn’t decipher the difference between earth and whatever the third element is, so they called it ‘loose earth,’ but that was just a way of saying ‘We don’t know what this symbol means.’ Unfortunately the original tablet the legend was carved on was destroyed centuries ago, and ever since we’ve only had those faulty translations to work from.”

“You think the three elements are the key to making this thing work?” Gabriel asked.

“I do,” Joyce said. She pointed to one of the Nesili symbols. “This is the one that means ‘earth’—ordinary earth, like dirt or soil.” She turned the starburst until the symbol was directly opposite her on the rim, then held the Star so the projected image lined up perfectly with an identical symbol on the map. The beam from Gabriel’s flashlight passed through one of the tiny green jewels and hit the map with a virescent pinpoint.

Right in the center of Borneo.

Joyce said in a hushed voice, “Arnuwanda made several trips to Borneo. I’ve been convinced for years that one of the Eyes of Teshub had to be here. This just confirms it.” She dug through the piles on the floor. While Gabriel held the Star and flashlight steady, she turned up a pencil, a scrap of paper, a protractor and a compass from the pile by the bed. “If I can just figure out these coordinates…” Squatting next to the map, she quickly jotted down notes, muttering to herself and estimating measurements.

A knock at the door made her spring up. She grabbed the map and the Star and rapidly covered them both with the oilcloth. Gabriel approached the door with one hand on the grip of his Colt. He turned the knob and pulled the door open.

Merpati stood in the doorway. She held a tray with a big plate of steaming dumplings on it.

Joyce ran over and took the tray from her. “My god, food.” She grabbed a dumpling and jammed it into her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered.

Gabriel nodded his thanks to Merpati and closed the door after she had left. He turned to Joyce, who was shoving another dumpling into her mouth. “I take it the cult didn’t bother feeding you.”

She shook her head, chewing. “Rainwater and roots,” she said around a mouthful. She swallowed and added, “They didn’t want me to die before the sacrifice, but they didn’t go out of their way to keep me fat and happy either.”

Gabriel picked up a dumpling and bit into it. Warm, salty liquid flowed onto his tongue, flavored by the scraps of pork and scallion nestled inside the dough. Noboru came over and helped himself. It had been a while since they’d eaten, too.

The Star of Arnuwanda lay untouched under the oilcloth until the plate had been emptied. Gabriel wiped his fingers on the sides of his pants and picked it up, turned it this way and that under the light. “It’s quite a find,” he said, finally. “And your figuring out how to use it—it’s impressive, Joyce.”

She walked over to him, a slight swagger to her step. “You don’t know how I used to dream about hearing those words come out of your mouth. When I was fifteen and sixteen and hearing about the things you were doing. When I was twenty or twenty-five, for that matter. The great Gabriel Hunt, impressed.”

“Well, I am. Once we’ve gotten it and you both home, I’ll want your help identifying the three locations—”

“My help?” She snatched the Star out of his hands. “At home? What are you talking about?”

“I think it’ll be safe for us to sleep here tonight,” Gabriel said, “though we should probably sleep in shifts, in case our faceless ghosts make another attempt.” He looked over at Noboru, who nodded. “Then tomorrow we’ll drive you to the airport, you can take the Foundation’s jet back to the States…”

Joyce was shaking her head. “Who the hell do you think you are? You think you can walk in here and take this away from me?”

“We’re not taking it away from you, we’re sending it back with you—”

“I don’t mean the Star, goddamn it! I mean the find!”

“The find nearly got you killed tonight,” Gabriel said.

“And? How many times have you nearly gotten killed? How would you feel if when it happened some big hero swept in and carried you to ‘safety,’ i.e. the sidelines, while other people finished what you started?”

“Any time someone wants to save my life,” Gabriel said, “that’s fine with me.”

“Sure,” Joyce said. “But you wouldn’t fly home afterwards and leave the rest of the expedition to someone else.”

No, Gabriel said, to himself. But to her he said, “I promised Michael I’d get you home safely.”

“Don’t you think I should have a say in this? Jesus. You’re worse than they are.” She began wrapping the Star up again. “You want to put me in a cage, too. At least the cult respected me enough to try to kill me.”

Noboru stepped forward, put one hand on Gabriel’s arm and one on Joyce’s. “If I may—”

“What?” Joyce snapped.

“I think she’s right,” Noboru said.

“Oh,” Joyce said, as Gabriel snapped, “What?”

“If this cult operates internationally, she won’t necessarily be safer in the U.S. than here. As long as they think she has this thing, they’ll keep coming after her. And if we send it back with her, they’ll be right. Meanwhile, if that map’s correct, what everyone’s looking for is somewhere around here. If we’re going to have to face them somewhere, better to do it where we can put an end to it.”

“Thank you,” Joyce said, with a tone of satisfaction. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

“All that business about liking your job,” Gabriel muttered, “and not wanting to make Michael angry…?”

Noboru shrugged. “He won’t like it any more if they kill her back in New York.”

Gabriel nodded. Noboru was right, of course. And so, for that matter, was Joyce. If someone had ever tried to take something like this out of his hands, he’d never have stood for it. But—

“It’ll be dangerous,” Gabriel said. “You might get killed. I can’t promise I’ll be able to keep you alive the next time.”

“—and airplanes can crash, and peanuts can give you anaphylactic shock,” Joyce said. “Life’s a thing of risks. You know that better than anyone.”

“You’re so right,” Gabriel said. “Next time we’re facing a dozen men with swords and a bowl of peanuts, you can deal with the swordsmen, I’ll handle the peanuts.”

They stared at each other in tense, unblinking confrontation till a grin broke out on Joyce’s face. “I’m picturing you throwing yourself on a bowl of peanuts,” she said, “like a soldier on a grenade.”

“Well, we really wouldn’t want you to go into anaphylactic shock,” Gabriel said.

“I wouldn’t,” Joyce said. “That was just an example. I’m not allergic to…”

But Gabriel had already turned away. “You want the first shift or the second?” he asked Noboru.

“Either’s fine with me,” Noboru said. “But first I’d be grateful if someone could tell me just what this ancient treasure is that everyone’s getting so excited over.”

“You mean the Three Eyes…?” Gabriel said.

“No,” Noboru said. “I mean whatever it is that the Three Eyes unlock.”

“The Spearhead,” Joyce said.

“It’s a weapon,” Gabriel said.

Joyce shook her head. “It’s much more than that. Hold on a sec, I want to show you something.” She went over to the corner of the room where they’d piled her books earlier, rummaged through them and pulled one out. She flipped through the pages and said, “When Teshub gave the Spearhead to the Hittites, the first thing they were supposed to have done with it was turn it on their enemies, the Kaska. In 2005, the Kaskan city of Sargonia was excavated in the northern hill country between Hatti and the Black Sea.” She handed Gabriel the book, open to a photograph of the excavated village. In it, Gabriel saw a stone structure, its pillars and walls black and cracked, the rest of it in ruins. “That was a temple,” Joyce went on. “The stone was charred and baked all the way through by some sort of extreme, concentrated blast of heat. And you see that at the bottom?”

There was a reflective pool surrounding the base of the temple. “What, the water?”

“That’s not water,” she said. “It’s glass.”

He looked up from the photograph.

“Whatever destroyed Sargonia was strong enough, hot enough, to turn the sand around the base of that temple into glass.”

Gabriel looked at the photograph again, studying the reflective surface. On closer inspection, he saw what might be faint fissures or cracks—something you wouldn’t see in water.

“Of course, we don’t know what did this,” he said. “We don’t know that it was the Spearhead.”

“Of course,” Joyce said. “But we know something did. And how many things in the ancient world could?”

“Lightning?” Noboru said, looking at the photo over Gabriel’s shoulder.

“You’re on the right track,” Joyce said. “A bolt of lightning might fuse the sand in a limited area, right where it struck. But not an area that large. A thousand bolts of lightning, though, directed simultaneously at a single target…”

“The wrath of the storm god,” Gabriel said.

“Precisely,” Joyce said. “Teshub was a storm god the way Thor or Zeus were storm gods. He wasn’t the god of rain or wind or hail, he was the god of thunder and lightning. And what is lightning but raw, unbridled electricity? A sufficiently strong blast…it could do to Sargonia what you saw in the photo. If it had the power of a small nuclear reactor.”

Noboru whistled softly. “Sounds like a weapon to me.”

“Sure,” Joyce said, “if you use it to attack a city. But what if you used it to power a city? I think the Spearhead is a source of power—not military power, not necessarily, but electrical power. Some sort of natural generator. And according to the descriptions in Hittite literature, it required no fuel to operate, gave off no byproducts—just pure, clean energy.” Her eyes lit up as she spoke about it. “Can you imagine the good that kind of technology could do for the world? Think of it. Cheap, efficient energy. No pollution, no radiation. You could use it to power entire nations. It could power water purification plants, hydrobotanical gardens. It could wipe out the need for oil, coal, gas, nuclear energy.” She touched Gabriel’s hand. “That’s the potential of this discovery. It could change the world.”

Gabriel studied her face. She was sincere. All traces of the mischievous child he remembered were gone, but there remained a childlike quality, a belief in the potential for a discovery like this to improve the world rather than destroy it.

He handed the book to Noboru. “It’s a weapon,” he said.

Chapter 7

“Get some sleep,” Gabriel said. “I’ll take first watch.” They’d moved Joyce into a room whose mattress and window were intact and had dragged another mattress into the hallway outside the door. Noboru was lying on the mattress, his shoes beside him, his knife in its sheath within easy reach. Gabriel sat across the hall with his back to the wall and his Colt in his lap.

“You think they’re going to come back tonight?” Noboru said. He fished a small, square pillbox out of his pants pocket, opened it, popped a pill in his mouth and snapped his head back to swallow it. When he saw Gabriel watching him with a raised eyebrow, he said, “To help me sleep,” and put the pillbox back in his pocket. He rubbed his chest with a grimace and then lay back on the mattress.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “But I don’t like them knowing where we are.”

Gabriel should have been tired, but his nerves were still in tight coils after the fight with the cult. He sat in the dark, facing the door, listening for any sudden noises. Despite the reassurances he had given Joyce, he knew it was a bad idea to stay at the guesthouse tonight. But they didn’t have any better alternative. Joyce needed food and rest after her ordeal and Noboru did, too; in any event, it was too late to make the long drive back to Balikpapan safely. But even one night was a risk he would have preferred not to take. The guesthouse was the first place the cult would look for Joyce again, and for the Star of Arnuwanda. So Gabriel waited, and listened. Through a narrow window at the far end of the hall he watched the stars grow brighter, then begin to dim as dawn approached. Even with the sun still hours away, the room grew warmer. He peeled off his shirt and used it to wipe the sweat off his face and chest.

Still nothing. No sign of the cult, just Noboru’s gentle snores. Gabriel thought about waking him to let him take second watch, but he decided to let Noboru sleep.

When the stars disappeared from the window altogether and the sky faded from gray to blue, the door to Joyce’s room suddenly swung open.

Gabriel grabbed his Colt, leaped to his feet.

Joyce grinned at him from the doorway. Somewhere during the night she’d used the pitcher and basin in the room to wash herself clean of the mud and grime of the jungle and had donned a fresh set of clothes. Gabriel was once again struck by what a beautiful woman she had become. She opened the door wider and leaned against the jamb. Noboru woke and turned to face her, rubbing sleep out of the corners of his eyes.

“Rise and shine,” Joyce said. “We’ve got a big day ahead of us. I spent the past hour narrowing down the coordinates and I think I know where the first Eye should be. It’s not far from here, maybe an hour’s drive.”

Gabriel nodded. “All right. Pack up your things and bring them down to the jeep. We’ll meet you there.”

“Way ahead of you,” Joyce said. She slung a heavy knapsack over one shoulder and stepped out into the hallway. “See you downstairs.” She headed for the stairway, then stopped and smirked at him over her shoulder. “Oh, and you might want to put on a shirt. Not that it isn’t a pretty sight, but…the sun can be pretty fierce around here. Wouldn’t want you to burn.”

Noboru drove the jeep out of the village and back onto the same unpaved road they’d taken from Balikpapan yesterday, continuing away from the city toward Central Kalamitan. In the passenger seat, Joyce looked over the notes she’d scribbled in her book. Periodically, she would consult her compass and either nod or give a new direction to Noboru: a bit farther, take the next right. Gabriel sat in the backseat, crammed in beside their suitcases, and wondered what, if anything, they would find. If the map and the Star were authentic, at the very least they could discover a gemstone whose value as an artifact would be enormous. Or maybe, if Joyce was right, they would find the first key to a revolutionary source of energy that could change the world. Either way, his interest was piqued. More than piqued.

The only problem, as he saw it, was Joyce herself. Could he trust her? She’d already lied to her uncle, lied to Michael, and nearly gotten herself killed. She was stubborn and foolhardy, rushing headlong into dangers she didn’t understand. True, he’d often been accused of the same thing himself, but he’d demonstrated he could handle it. Joyce, on the other hand…

Maybe he was just being overprotective. But that didn’t sit any better with him, because it forced him to think about why he was being so protective. Was it because she was Daniel Wingard’s niece? Because he’d promised Michael he’d bring her home safely? Or was it something else?

Like the charge he’d felt when she’d looked him up and down in the hallway.

There’d been no shortage of women in Gabriel’s life over the years. But there was undeniably something special about this one…

Pull yourself together, he thought. He couldn’t let himself become distracted, not with the Cult of Ulikummis still out there. Not only were they still desperate to get their hands on the Star of Arnuwanda, they had also been humiliated in defeat, and that made them doubly dangerous. That the cult hadn’t returned to the guesthouse last night meant nothing, except the likelihood that they were regrouping. If he let himself get sidetracked, if he lost focus, they could all wind up hanging over a fire pit.

“Stop here!” Joyce cried suddenly.

Noboru hit the brakes, bringing the jeep to a halt on the side of the road, and cut the engine.

“This is the spot.” Joyce hopped out of the jeep and gestured toward the trees. “It should be about five hundred yards in.”

Gabriel followed her out, then reached back into the jeep and took a machete from the backseat.

Noboru glanced at the morning sun and loosened his collar. “If it’s that far, you’d better start walking. It’s only going to get hotter out.”

“You’re not coming?” Gabriel said.

“Someone’s got to stay with the jeep and keep an eye out for trouble.” He patted the glove compartment. “If I see anyone coming, especially anyone wearing a skull mask, I’ll send up a flare. You should be able to see it through the trees.”

Gabriel led the way into the forest. The vegetation seemed more tightly packed here. He made judicious use of the machete, cutting away vines and branches to clear a trail. Behind him, Joyce kept an eye on her notebook and compass, shouting directions at him as if he were a shady New York City cab driver looking to jack up the fare.

“No, wait, to the left,” she said. “We’re getting all turned around.”

“You just said right.”

“Yeah, left. See if you can get those vines out of the way so we can keep going.”

He sighed and started chopping again. “This better be one hell of a gemstone,” he muttered.

The jungle in daytime was just as active as night, only with different kinds of wildlife. Instead of the buzzing of nocturnal insects, the air was filled with the sound of fluttering wings and screeching birdcalls. Proboscis monkeys and long-tailed macaques jumped from branch to branch in the canopy above, barely visible blurs of white, gray and tan hair. The terrain was hillier here too, slowing their progress and forcing them to exert more energy in the rising heat.

Gabriel glanced back. Joyce was breathing hard and fanning herself with her notebook. Her face and neck were glistening. His own body was already soaked in sweat, and the intense humidity didn’t seem like it was going to let up anytime soon.

“Do you want to rest?” he asked.

Joyce shook her head, catching her breath. “No, I’m fine. We should keep going.” She undid the top few buttons of her thin cotton blouse. Gabriel quickly turned away to chop at the vines again.

Stay focused.

“It shouldn’t be much farther now,” she said. “Maybe another fifty yards.”

Gabriel hacked some more branches out of their way. “Any idea what we should be looking for? Did the Hittites say how the Eyes were hidden?”

“The legends say this Eye was ‘buried in the earth’s embrace, where only the dead shall see its beauty.’ Scholars think this means the gemstone is hidden in a cemetery.” Gabriel remembered Noboru’s comment on their way out from the airport, that Joyce had been asking about a cemetery in the jungle. He also remembered Noboru saying there wasn’t any in Borneo. But Borneo was a big place, most of it covered with jungle. With the right map…

They came out of the densely packed trees into a small clearing, roughly forty yards across. On the far side, the ground rose up in a steep slope before the thick foliage resumed. Gabriel sheathed the machete in his belt. Joyce pushed her sunglasses up to the top of her head.

“This isn’t right,” she said, her eyes darting over the layer of twigs and leaves covering the grass. She checked the compass against her notes. “This is the spot. The first Eye of Teshub is supposed to be here.”

“Well, it doesn’t look like a cemetery,” Gabriel said.

She shook the compass, as if that would somehow change its reading. She flipped through the pages of her notebook. “It should be here.”

“First lesson of field work,” Gabriel said. “Don’t rely on maps to stay accurate for more than, oh, a thousand years.” He squatted, scanning the clearing. “Even assuming you read the Star right, any number of things could have changed.”

“For instance, a cemetery could get buried, right?” Joyce said. “We’re probably standing right on top of it.”

Gabriel shook his head and ran a hand through the grass. “Maybe,” he said, “but didn’t Hittite death rituals mostly involve cremation? As I recall, only high priests and kings were preserved and buried—and they got huge stone tombs built for them. If something that size had ever been here, there would still be some sign of it. But there’s nothing.” He stood.

“No.” Joyce shook her head. “It’s here, I know it is. It has to be.”

Gabriel walked over to her. “Look, I know you were excited about your first find, but—”

Joyce grabbed the handle of the machete and pulled it out of his belt so fast he didn’t have time to stop her. She started marching toward the slope at the far end of the clearing. “I’m going to keep looking,” she called back to him. “Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”

He sprinted up behind her. “Joyce…don’t let yourself be blinded by what you want to find. For every legend that points to something real, there are dozens that are just stories. You have to prepare yourself for the fact that sometimes what you’re looking for just isn’t there. Believe me, it’s happened to me plenty of times.”

She ignored him and continued storming up the slope. Nearly at the top she lost her footing amid the twigs and roots littering the hillside. She slipped suddenly, cried out and slid back down toward the clearing.

“Joyce!” Gabriel ran to her. She had tumbled to the base of the hill. When he got to her, her cheek was smeared with dirt, but thankfully she looked okay otherwise. He held his hands out. She glared at him, then cursed under her breath, took his hands and let him help her back to her feet.

“I’m fine,” she snapped, yanking her hands away. She bent to pick up the machete she’d dropped. Then she froze and stared at the grass on the side of the hill. “Gabriel,” she whispered. “Come here. Look at this.”

He bent down next to her. “What is it?”

“There,” she said. She pointed at a patch of grass that had been torn up by her fall. She’d struck a stone with the machete, dislodging it, and where it had been there was now a narrow hole. The sun reflected off of something inside the depression. She pushed the tip of the machete into the hole. It hit something flat, smooth and hard. Gabriel recognized the sound it made right away: the tink of metal on metal.

“Something’s buried under there,” Gabriel said.

“The first Eye was given to the earth,” Joyce murmured.

They looked at each other, then back at the hill. Joyce started scraping the dirt away with the edge of the machete while Gabriel dug with his fingers, pulling out divots of soil and tossing them over his shoulder. It was slow work, but after twenty minutes they’d cleared away enough earth to reveal a stretch of dark metal with a long seam in it. A few minutes later, they uncovered the rusty bulk of a hinge.

“It’s a door,” Gabriel said. “There must be a whole structure under here.”

They attacked the hill again, digging faster now in their excitement. Joyce plunged and scraped with the machete like a coal miner working a pickaxe, and Gabriel dug until his fingers cramped. Another half hour passed without his even noticing it, and though his back and shoulders ached and he was tired and drenched in sweat, thoughts of what lay beyond the mysterious metal door kept him going. Joyce didn’t waver either, didn’t even take a break. Finally, they’d cleared away a rough rectangle of earth, exposing the metal door that lay beneath. The seam around it was caked with dirt, as were the ornate carvings that decorated the door. There was no knob or handle visible, but there was a lock.

Gabriel knelt to inspect it. He picked the dirt away and saw that the keyway was shaped almost like an upward-pointing arrow, with not one but three slots. Above the lock was a rough etching of a skull with a diamond between its eye sockets. Gabriel recognized it right away. The muscles in his back tightened.

It was the same design that had been on the Death’s Head Key.

Vincenzo de Montoya had found the key somewhere in Asia—but no one knew exactly where. Even de Montoya’s own journals were vague on the specifics. Now Gabriel had the answer: Borneo. De Montoya had taken the key with him upon leaving the island and died in the Amazon with it still on a strap around his neck. Five hundred years later, Gabriel had found it, only to lose it again almost immediately.

No, scratch that. He hadn’t lost it. It had been taken from him at gunpoint. Stolen by someone who claimed to know what the key unlocked.

“Gabriel Hunt, I presume?” a reedy voice called from behind them.

Gabriel whirled around. A man stood at the tree line where Gabriel and Joyce had entered the clearing. He was not tall, maybe five-foot-five, and dressed in khaki shorts and a beige short-sleeved shirt. A Tilley hat the same color as his shirt rested atop his head, throwing a band of shade across his eyes. He looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. Behind him stood four men in jungle camouflage, their guns drawn.

“And this must be the enchanting Joyce Wingard,” the man continued. He tipped his hat. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Edgar Grissom, and I owe you my thanks. You have saved me a great deal of time and effort.”

Gabriel scanned the treetops. Why hadn’t Noboru sent off a flare to warn them?

The answer came a moment later when Noboru came into view, his hands behind his back.

Then Gabriel saw the man behind Noboru. A blond man wearing a thick cargo vest and pressing a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum against Noboru’s neck. The sunlight glinted off a ring on the man’s hand. A horned stag’s head.

“Ah, there you are,” Grissom said. “Mr. Hunt, I believe you’ve already met my son Julian.”

Chapter 8

Julian shoved Noboru forward, sending him stumbling toward Gabriel and Joyce. Gabriel reached out and caught him before he could fall.

“They came up behind me,” Noboru began.

“It’s all right,” Gabriel said. He glanced at Grissom’s men. With so many guns drawn and pointed their way, there was no chance of running. Certainly Noboru couldn’t, not with his arms tied behind his back.

Gabriel watched Julian walk over to his father. At six feet, he towered over the elder Grissom.

“It was in one of the suitcases,” Julian said. He reached inside his cargo vest and pulled out the Star.

Grissom snatched it out of his son’s hand and held it up so that it gleamed in the sunlight. “The Star of Arnuwanda,” he murmured. “Oh, you have saved me a great deal of time and effort indeed.”

“How did you find us?” Joyce demanded.

Grissom handed the Star back to Julian. “It wasn’t difficult. We knew where you were staying, but you’d already left the guesthouse by the time we got there. The old woman there was distinctly unhelpful, but in spite of that we were able to follow your trail here.”

Joyce blanched. “Merpati…”

“Was that her name?” Edgar Grissom said. “Remarkable woman, really. Took three bullets before she finally stopped swinging that damned shovel.”

Joyce took a step toward Grissom, but suddenly five guns were aimed at her. Gabriel stuck out his arm to block her, shaking his head. Joyce clenched her jaw and stepped back.

Grissom walked toward them, flanked by his men. “Tie them up,” he ordered.

The four gunmen came forward, surrounding them. One reached into Gabriel’s holster and pulled out his Colt, while the others yanked his and Joyce’s arms behind their backs and knotted lengths of rope around their wrists.

Julian and his father inspected the door excavated from the hillside. Grissom ran a hand over the metal. “Iron,” he said. “The Hittite Empire was always ahead of its time. They were working with iron as early as the fourteenth century B.C., almost two hundred years before the rest of the ancient world.” He turned to Joyce. “But that wasn’t all that set them apart, eh, Ms. Wingard? There is also the little matter of the Spearhead. The power of the storm, harnessed and ready to be wielded like a broom to sweep their enemies from the face of the earth.”

“So that’s what you’re after,” Joyce said. “Destruction.”

“A weapon so powerful no army can stand against it?” Grissom replied. “Oh yes, Ms. Wingard, I want that very, very much. Julian, the key.”

Julian reached into his collar and lifted the Death’s Head Key, still on its leather strap, from around his neck. He passed it to Grissom, who bent forward to inspect the lock in the door. He blew at it, picked out the dirt that clogged it and lined up the three blades of the Death’s Head Key with the lock’s triple keyway. Before he could slide it in, the key jumped out of his hand and sank by itself into the lock. Grissom looked at Julian. “Magnetized?” He gripped the key’s skull-shaped bow and struggled to turn it in the ancient lock, his face turning red with effort. As he completed a single rotation, a loud click echoed from the door, and it began to scrape open on its hinges, swinging toward Grissom. He stepped back to give it room. Dirt rained from the seams between the door and its frame. The old, rusty hinges groaned, squeaked and cracked under the pressure of being pushed open again by some ancient mechanism after thousands of years.

“The first Eye of Teshub,” Grissom said. “Thrown with its brothers into the wind by the storm god himself, separated from the others and given to the earth. Isn’t that how the legend goes, Ms. Wingard?”

Joyce glared at him.

“Bring them forward,” Grissom ordered his men. “They should see this. After all, it was their hard work that led us to this glorious moment.”

The gunmen shoved Gabriel, Joyce and Noboru up to the doorway. Julian caught Gabriel by the shoulder as he passed. “Nice scar,” he said, nodding toward the mark of stitches on Gabriel’s cheek.

From inside the doorway, dusty, stale air swirled out of the darkness. Grissom coughed, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose and mouth with it. He gestured impatiently at Julian, who handed him a flashlight. Grissom switched it on as the opening door finally ground to a halt. He pointed the beam into the darkness, illuminating the cobwebs that hung in the corners of the doorway. Beyond was only empty space, until Grissom lowered the beam and revealed a flight of stone steps leading down. He folded the handkerchief back into his pocket and walked toward the doorway.

One of Grissom’s men pushed Gabriel again, the gun pressed to his spine. He stepped into the darkness, watching Grissom’s flashlight beam bob down the steps ahead of him. Gabriel carefully descended the stairs. The air inside the crypt was stifling and oppressive. The stone steps were covered in loose dirt and grit, making it tricky to find his footing. Cobwebs hung everywhere, tickling his face and sticking to his hair. Behind him, he heard Joyce stumble and one of the gunmen bark angrily at her to keep moving.

At the bottom of the steps was a long corridor. Grissom had stopped in the middle and was shining his flashlight along the walls. Six alcoves had been carved into the walls, and inside each was a skeleton, the bones brown with rot and age. Their jaws hung open—the ones that still had their jaws attached—and their bodies were twisted into frightful positions, their hands curled into claws. Hittite warriors, Gabriel guessed from the rusted, crumbling armor hanging off the bones. They’d been buried alive with the Eye to stand as eternal guardians, most likely dying from asphyxiation long before starvation set in. While the door wasn’t a perfect airtight seal, the fact that these millennia-old skeletons weren’t piles of dust was evidence enough of how little air had gotten inside once it was closed.

A cemetery in the jungle, Gabriel thought. Joyce had been on the right track. Only the cemetery in question was two stories underground.

The corridor ended in a large archway that was draped with a gossamer film of long-abandoned webs. Beyond, Gabriel could just make out a shimmering green light playing along the stone wall of the next chamber. Grissom led the way with Julian at his side, tearing the webs open as if he were parting curtains. The gunman behind Gabriel prodded him to follow. He glanced back at Joyce and Noboru to make sure they were all right. Noboru looked stoic, unwilling to show their captors any emotion: no fear, no anger. Joyce, however, did look angry. Furious. Gabriel knew what she was feeling. This was supposed to be her find, her moment of triumph. She’d worked hard for it, put her life on the line for it, only to see it snatched away by a couple of thugs with guns. Gabriel glared at the back of Julian’s head. Oh yes, he knew exactly what she was feeling.

As they filed into the chamber beyond the arch, Gabriel took in their surroundings. To one side of the chamber was a stone pedestal that looked like a natural formation, a stalagmite with its sides and top smoothed flat by ancient tools. On top of the pedestal was a stone carving of a hand, rising up on a thick wrist. Nestled in the grip of its fingers was an enormous, octagonal emerald. The jewel was flat and wide like a saucer, with a circumference roughly the size of a softball. Where everything around it was corroded, rotted or covered in dust, the emerald looked as clean and polished as the day it had been cut. It seemed to be lit from within by a natural iridescence, sending green light gleaming against the walls and illuminating the paintings there. Gabriel recognized the faded art as scenes from the myths of Teshub: the storm god riding a chariot pulled by two bulls, wrestling the sea serpent Hedammu, slaying the dragon Illuyanka, battling the stone god Ulikummis, sitting on a throne beside the sun goddess Arinna and their son Sarruma. And one final image: Teshub hurling what appeared to be three separate thunderbolts away from a horde of angry-looking men in traditional Hittite armor. The scattering of the Three Eyes.

A low hum reached his ears. He glanced around the chamber, trying to find the source, until he realized it was coming from the emerald itself.

Grissom stepped up to the pedestal. His whole body seemed to tremble in anticipation. His flashlight beam struck the wall behind the pedestal and revealed large cuneiform symbols etched across the stone. It was the same alphabet as on the Star and the map.

Grissom swept his beam slowly across the symbols. “‘The fire at world’s end,’” he translated. “The end of the world! An apocalyptic prophecy. How perfect.”

“Light,” Joyce said.

Grissom turned to her. “What?”

“It’s doesn’t say the fire at world’s end, it says the light at world’s end,” Joyce replied. “The Nesili cuneiforms for light and fire are close, but they’re not the same. It’s an easy mistake to make, for an amateur.”

Grissom frowned. “If you’re expecting to get a rise out of me, Ms. Wingard, you’re sorely mistaken.” He turned back to the gemstone. They barely heard him mutter, “My son, on the other hand…”

Julian whirled around and punched Joyce in the stomach so quickly Gabriel didn’t even see it coming. Joyce doubled over, coughing and trying to catch her breath.

“Leave her alone!” Gabriel shouted. He struggled against his bonds, but the barrel of the gun behind him dug deeper into his back, a reminder to behave himself.

“What kind of a coward do you have to be,” Noboru said, “to hit a defenseless woman?”

Julian stepped up to Noboru and pulled back his fist, this time the one with the silver stag’s head ring. Without even turning around to see what his son was doing, Grissom said, “That’s enough, Julian.” Glowering at Noboru, the blond man lowered his hand and returned to his father’s side.

The gunman behind Joyce pulled on the ropes around her wrists, yanking her upright. She coughed again, her face red with exertion, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked.

She nodded and spat on the ground. “He just caught me off guard.” She shouted at Julian, “Next time try that when my hands aren’t tied!”

“Hold your tongue, Ms. Wingard, or I will remove it,” Grissom said. He reached for the gemstone. As his hands moved closer to it, the humming seemed to grow higher in pitch. “An energy field,” he marveled. “Given off by the stone itself. There can be no doubt it’s just as the legend describes. Not only a key to Teshub’s weapon, but a kind of battery that powers it.” He lifted the emerald out of the stone hand’s grasp and laughed with excitement. “I can feel it. Like the pulse of the storm god himself!”

Julian pulled a black velvet sack out of a pocket in his vest. Grissom deposited the emerald into it. Julian pulled the strings around the sack’s mouth tight and returned it to his pocket.

A strange grinding sound came from the pedestal. The fingers of the stone hand suddenly bent inward on hidden hinges, forming a fist around the space where the emerald had been. Above, the ceiling rumbled and started to pull back from where it met the wall. Thick brown clods of dirt rained down over the pedestal. The ceiling continued to slide away on ancient tracks, dumping more dirt into the chamber. Gears within the walls groaned, and a thick stone slab started slowly descending in front of the archway, gradually sealing off the way they’d come in.

Grissom, Julian and the four gunmen all made a dash for the archway. Gabriel glanced around quickly, desperate to find another way out of the chamber. But there was no other exit, only the arch, and that was rapidly vanishing behind the descending slab. The dirt, meanwhile, was already up to his shins, with more raining down as the ceiling continued to withdraw.

Joyce and Noboru hurried toward the archway, their steps uneven. Joyce stumbled and dropped to one knee. Gabriel came up behind her and tried to help her to her feet again. It wasn’t easy with his hands tied behind him. He nudged his shoulder under her arm, and she leaned back against him, levering herself upright. The level of dirt was rising higher, with some piles already at waist height. More rained down continuously, making it harder to move. By the time they reached the archway, only a narrow opening remained between the growing pile of dirt on the floor and the slab of stone dropping from above.

Joyce plunged through, tumbling forward headfirst, her feet kicking as she fell. Then Noboru slid through, his back scraping the underside of the stone slab. Gabriel struggled forward. He threw himself at the shrinking hole, ducking under the slab and eeling out into the corridor on his belly. A moment later, the bottom of the slab hit the top of the dirt mound below it, closing off the chamber.

Pushing himself back onto his feet, he could hear the dirt, tons of it, pouring against the other side of the stone slab. If they’d been trapped inside, they would shortly have joined the six Hittites in being buried alive.

Grissom and his men were standing around them in a half-circle, their guns drawn.

“Well,” Grissom said, brushing dirt from his legs. “That’s one down, two to go.”

Gabriel shook the dirt from his hair. “What are you going to do with us?”

“Never fear. I have uses for you and your friends yet, Mr. Hunt,” Grissom replied. He started back along the corridor toward the steps to the surface.

As they were marched along behind Grissom, Gabriel tried to loosen the knot around his wrists, but the ropes wouldn’t budge.

When they emerged into the sunlight, Grissom kept walking toward the forest. Julian stayed behind, hovering by the door of the crypt. Gabriel kept his eyes on him even as the gunman behind him shoved him forward, watching intently as Julian pulled the Death’s Head Key out of the lock of the still-open iron door and hung it around his neck again.

By this point, Grissom had reached the tree line. He turned to face them. “We’re done here,” he called to Julian. “Destroy the crypt.”

“What?” Gabriel said. He turned around to see one of Grissom’s men passing Julian a bundle of dynamite.

“You can’t!” Joyce cried. “Do you have any idea how old that crypt is? Who knows what else can be learned from it?”

Grissom shrugged. “Undoubtedly. But I don’t want anyone to know where we’ve been, or what we have found. I’m afraid certain sacrifices must be made.” He turned his back on them and kept walking into the trees.

Gabriel watched as Julian flicked a lighter under the long fuse attached to the dynamite. Julian threw the lit bundle into the open door and began tearing across the clearing toward the spot where his father had vanished. “Move!” the gunman behind Gabriel shouted. “Now!”

They had just reached the edge of the clearing when a loud explosion rocked the trees. Birds screamed and flew out of the canopy, soaring away from the cloud of dark smoke that billowed into the sky.

From his vantage point amid the trees on the opposite side, Vassily Platonov saw the blond man toss the dynamite into the doorway, then watched him and the others run off, the armed men and their three bound captives. The blond man was not one of those who had deprived Ulikummis of his sacrifice the night before, but it hardly mattered. In following the interlopers who had dared come to their sacred ground and free the American girl, Vassily now saw there were even more trespassers to be dealt with. The ground shook suddenly with an enormous subterranean explosion. Black smoke erupted from the doorway as the structure collapsed, taking half the hillside with it.

In the jungle beyond, Vassily’s followers slipped silently to the ground from their places in the trees, like ghosts emerging from the darkness. Vassily gestured at them with his staff, and they lowered the skull masks over their faces.

The interlopers had destroyed a holy site, surely a tomb of their ancestors. Just as surely, they had found and taken the gemstone that he as the high priest of Ulikummis had vowed to find himself. The time for merely watching and following was over. He would make them pay for the affronts they had committed. Then he would locate the second and third Eyes of Teshub, secure the Spearhead and use it to wipe the followers of all false gods from the face of the earth.

Vassily motioned to his followers, and together they disappeared into the jungle.

Chapter 9

A heavy, warm rain had begun to fall in sheets by the time Grissom’s men marched Gabriel and the others out of the jungle and onto the road. Noboru’s jeep stood wet and muddy where they’d left it. Parked right beside it was Grissom’s much larger one, military-style with three rows of seats. Gabriel, Joyce and Noboru were shoved into Grissom’s jeep, Gabriel and Joyce in the middle, and Noboru in the back with two of Grissom’s men. Grissom took the wheel, and Julian sat in the passenger seat. The other two men got into Noboru’s jeep.

The engines roared to life and the jeeps pulled out. The bumpy, unpaved road jostled Gabriel and Joyce into each other. The ropes around his wrists bit into his skin. The rain soaked through his clothes.

Joyce shook a wet strand of hair out of her face and shouted over the downpour, “Where are you taking us?”

Grissom smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “Patience, Ms. Wingard. You’ll find out soon enough.”

Julian glanced into the rearview too. Gabriel stared at him in the reflection, not breaking eye contact. Julian’s gaze returned to the road, then flitted back to the mirror a moment later. Gabriel didn’t blink. Memories of Julian pistol-whipping him back at the Discoverers League and stealing the Death’s Head Key replayed in his head and it must have shown in his eyes, since Julian looked away quickly.

Joyce leaned against him, her sopping wet hair falling in thick ropes across her face. “I’m sorry you got involved in all this,” she said.

“Funny,” he replied. “That’s usually my line.”

She leaned closer until a wet strand of hair touched his cheek, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “If we get out of this—”

“We will,” he said. “I just need to think.”

“If we get out of this,” she continued, her voice insistent, “we can’t let Grissom keep the Star. We can’t let him find the other two Eyes. Whatever it is they activate, what ever the Spearhead turns out to be…it would definitely be a weapon in his hands.”

Gabriel thought of Sargonia, a city of ash and cinders and glass after the Spearhead had been turned on it.

Joyce went on, “If it comes down to it, if you have to choose between the Star or me…”

“It won’t come to that,” he said.

“Promise me if you have to make a choice you’ll take the Star and run. Leave me behind if you have to, just keep it out of his hands.”

“It won’t come to that,” Gabriel repeated.

“Goddamn it, promise me.”

“Joyce—”

She stared at him, her mouth a tight line. Rainwater dripped from her nose and chin.

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”

“Because it’s only fair you know what I’ll do if I’m faced with the same decision,” she said. Her expression didn’t change. He had to admit, she was tougher than he’d given her credit for. Looking in her ice blue eyes, he had no doubt she’d leave him behind if it meant getting the Star away from Grissom.

The jeeps turned off the road and barreled along a narrow stretch of dirt that cut through the foliage. Eventually the leaves and branches around them thinned and parted, revealing a campsite filled with wide canvas tents. More jeeps were parked around the camp, and men dressed in jungle camo busily passed in and out of the tents. Gabriel counted at least a dozen of them, with god knew how many more out of sight. Who knew how long Grissom had been on the trail of the Spearhead, but he’d amassed a small army along the way.

The jeep stopped suddenly, and Gabriel lurched forward, banging his chest against the front seat. Grissom killed the engine and jumped out of the jeep. His men dragged Gabriel, Joyce and Noboru out of the vehicle and marched them into the nearest tent. Three chairs had been set up in the center and a folding table stood to one side, a small, rectangular wooden box atop it. They were forced to sit and the ropes around their wrists were replaced with new bindings that secured their arms to the chair backs. Gabriel was seated in the middle chair, with Joyce on his left and Noboru on his right.

The tent flap opened, and Grissom entered. Rainwater dripped off the wide brim of his hat. He had a white towel draped over his shoulder. He nodded to his men. They exited the tent, except for one who stayed inside by the flap, one hand on the butt of his holstered gun.

“Well,” Grissom said, “I must say, this is better than I could have hoped for.” He took off his hat and shook the water from it onto the ground. He pulled the towel off his shoulder and dried his face and hair.

“Why are we here?” Gabriel demanded. “You’ve already got the Star of Arnuwanda.”

“Indeed I do, but what I don’t have, Mr. Hunt, is an understanding of it. Not yet. We have a copy of Arnuwanda’s map, but without knowing how to use the Star to read it, it’s merely a curious historical document. Yet in your hands the map and the Star together somehow led you to the crypt in the jungle. What I want to know is how.” He placed the hat back on his head.

Gabriel glared at him and kept his mouth shut. Grissom looked at Joyce and then Noboru. After a moment, he nodded solemnly. “You’re reluctant to tell me. That’s understandable. I haven’t been the most pleasant host.” He folded the towel carefully, and put it down on the table beside the wooden box. He opened the box, pulled out a long object wrapped in a thick purple cloth and began to unwrap it. “But let me assure you, I can be even less pleasant.”

Grissom lifted a dagger out of the cloth. He held it up so that the light from the generator-fed lamp in the corner glinted off the edges of the long, sharp blade. The handle was made of ivory, a curling dragon carved along the hilt from the pommel to the crossguard. “Thousands of years ago, the Chinese of the Shang and Zhou dynasties sacrificed young men and women to the gods of their rivers. They did this to prevent flooding, and to ensure the supply of fish continued for another year. A government minister named Ximen Bao put an end to the practice a few centuries later, but not before that famous Chinese ingenuity took hold. They liked to put their sacrifices in the rivers bleeding copiously, you see, and they needed a device to speed the process of preparing them.” He touched a hidden button in the dragon’s eye, and two additional blades sprang out of the handle alongside the first. He crossed to Gabriel’s chair. “Of course, this isn’t an original. They only had bronze to work with back then. But I do so like the design, don’t you? It’s far more of a precision instrument than it appears.”

He touched the tips of the blades to Gabriel’s face. Gabriel fought the urge to flinch as they neared his eye. The sharp metal slid along his skin, finally stopping when Grissom reached the stitches on his cheek. “I see my son was quite vehement in retrieving the Death’s Head Key from you, Mr. Hunt. He’s a good boy, but he doesn’t always know when to stop. Doesn’t know how much is too much. Perhaps he gets that from me.” Grissom flicked his wrist suddenly, and the tip of the central blade cut through a stitch. Gabriel clenched his jaw as a drop of blood rolled down his cheek. “We can both be quite persistent. Neither of us lets people stand in the way of our goals. Like father, like son. It’s best when things match, don’t you think? The important things, anyway.” He moved the knife to Gabriel’s other cheek and flicked it again, opening a second wound to mirror the first. “Tell me how the Star is used.”

Gabriel didn’t answer. Blood trickled down both cheeks. He grit his teeth against the pain radiating from the incisions.

For a moment the tent was silent except for the drumming of the rain on the canvas roof. Then Grissom said, “Very well.” He grabbed Gabriel’s collar in his fist and tore his shirt down the front. “I don’t know how well you know knives, Mr. Hunt, but I had this one made from the best high-carbon steel there is. It never dulls, no matter how much flesh it slices.” His hand shot forward suddenly, and the tips of all three blades stopped less than an inch from Gabriel’s chest. “Or so I’m told. Shall we put it to the test?”

With another flick of his wrist, Grissom slashed a new wound into Gabriel’s skin. Blood welled up in the three parallel cuts the dagger left in his chest, then spilled out, painting three red lines down to his ribs. Behind his back, Gabriel’s hands clenched into fists. The ropes chewed into his wrists.

“I see you’re a stubborn man,” Grissom went on. “I understand this. I am one myself. When I want something, I’ll do what ever it takes to make it mine. I’ve never cared for the word no. I care even less for those who say it to me.” He swung his arm in a quick arc, drawing three more lines of blood across Gabriel’s chest, like a claw mark. Gabriel gritted his teeth and shut his eyes against the sharp pain until it dulled. When he opened his eyes again, Grissom smiled. “Still with us, Mr. Hunt? Good. I’d be sorely disappointed if you didn’t make it past the opening act.”

Grissom coughed suddenly, his whole body shaking with the effort. Another cough followed, and another, wracking his frame so strongly he doubled over. He pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and coughed into it. A few seconds later, the coughing fit stopped and Grissom put the handkerchief back in his pocket. Gabriel caught a flash of red in its folds. Blood?

“Perhaps you don’t know what it’s like to be weak, Mr. Hunt. To be a ticking clock, counting down to your own death as your body eats itself alive. To have nothing to look forward to but a few remaining years of misery, immobility and pain. To have more than enough money for anything you want, and yet still not enough to extend your life. Time is a thief, Mr. Hunt. It steals everything from you, little by little. I watched Julian’s mother waste away on her deathbed. I saw the pity in everyone’s eyes, heard it in the pitch of their voices. I won’t allow that to happen to me. Pity is what you get when people don’t fear you. Other people’s pity only makes you weaker. But fear…” He swung the dagger once more, slicing three fresh cuts across Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel grunted in pain from between his clenched teeth. “Fear makes you much, much stronger. Now, tell me how to use the Star.”

Streams of sweat rolled off Gabriel’s forehead. Each new cut felt like a fire burning just under his skin. But as long as he could keep Grissom talking, keep the madman thinking he was the one with the answers and not Joyce, he would take it for as long as he had to. There was no other choice.

Grissom slashed his abdomen. This time Gabriel cried out. Judging from the smile on the old man’s face, it seemed to make Grissom happy.

“Can you imagine,” Grissom continued, “how intrigued I was when I heard the legend of the Spearhead? What I could do with such a thing. The fire at world’s end. Why should it just be my end that approaches? Why not the whole world’s, just like the legend says, only with my hand setting the blaze? When my wife died, the world didn’t care. It carried on as if nothing had happened. The next morning was like all the ones before it: birds sang, breezes blew, politicians lied, all of it. There will be no ordinary next morning when I die, Mr. Hunt. For me, the world will sit up and take notice. There will be no forgetting the name Edgar Grissom.”

“You’re…” Gabriel began, and then shook his head. The words were so inadequate. But he said them anyway. “You’re crazy.”

Grissom smiled. “And now we finally hear from Gabriel Hunt! Has your tongue been loosened at last? Tell me what I need to know and the pain stops.”

Gabriel looked away. The patter of the rain on the canvas roof slowed to a stop, amplifying the silence that filled the tent.

“A pity,” Grissom said. “I was hoping you’d be more cooperative.” He looked down at the three blood-tipped blades of his dagger. “You see, until I have what I want, I need you alive. Your friends, however, are of no such importance to me.” Grissom turned to Joyce. She kept her head down, her eyes to the ground. “There’s something wonderful about women, don’t you think?” He reached out with the knife until the blades’ tips just brushed the skin of her clavicle. “The way the fear stays in their eyes even after they die.”

He moved the dagger to the base of her neck, then up to her throat. Joyce tilted her head away from the sharp blades and glared up at Grissom, her lips pulled back from her teeth.

“Tell me how to use the Star, Mr. Hunt,” Grissom insisted, “or I will open her lovely neck.”

Gabriel sat silently, his skin singing with pain, blood rolling down his ribs and abdomen. Beside him, Noboru tugged against the ropes that bound him to his chair. Gabriel met Joyce’s eyes, and she shot him a look of steely resolve that erased any doubt whether she meant what she’d said. She was willing to die to keep the Spearhead out of Grissom’s hands.

But what if the legend was wrong? They’d found one gemstone, but what if there weren’t any others? Or what if the Spearhead didn’t exist anymore, or if it never had? He couldn’t let her die for something no one even knew for sure was real. He met her eyes again, then looked over at Grissom, and saw an equal determination in each pair of eyes. Rock, meet hard place. Gabriel struggled against his bindings, trying to slip a hand free, but the knot was too tight.

Grissom frowned. “I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hunt. You’ve backed me into a corner. I dislike hurting women, but I’m afraid I have no choice now. When you look back at this moment in the future—should I allow you a future—I want you to remember whose fault this really was.” He grabbed Joyce’s hair in one hand and pulled her head back. She gritted her teeth and clamped her eyes shut. Grissom swung the dagger back, preparing to slash it across her throat.

“It’s a code!” Noboru shouted suddenly. “It’s a code.”

Grissom stayed his hand. Joyce opened her eyes. Gabriel turned to Noboru and saw the pained, desperate look on the older man’s face.

“Of course it’s a code,” Grissom said. “But how does it work? What is the key?”

“The elements,” Noboru said. “Earth, water. The symbols for the elements.”

“Don’t!” Joyce yelled at him.

Grissom let go of her hair and walked over to stand in front of Noboru. “The elements, you say. You mean the three elements from the Teshub legend, of course.”

“Noboru,” Joyce pleaded.

He looked at her and shook his head. “I couldn’t let him do it.”

“Go on,” Grissom said, raising his voice impatiently.

“The first gemstone, the one you have…it’s the one for earth,” Noboru said. “The second is water.”

“Noboru, don’t,” Joyce warned again.

Grissom shot a silencing a glance her way.

“Yes, but the third one, that’s the mystery,” Grissom said. “Any fool with half a brain knows the original translation is wrong. ‘Loose soil’ makes no sense. But you’ve figured out what it means, haven’t you? Tell me.”

Noboru swallowed hard and looked away from Grissom’s eyes. “No. We haven’t. None of us has.”

Grissom grabbed a fistful of Noboru’s hair and held the three-bladed dagger to his throat. “I don’t have time for games. What is the third element?”

“We don’t know,” Noboru insisted. “I swear.”

“You’re trying my patience,” Grissom hissed. “Hunt, speak to me or he dies.” He pulled back the dagger, ready to strike.

“Sorry, Joyce,” Gabriel said. “You and I are one thing, but Noboru didn’t make you any promises. I’ll tell you what you want to know, Grissom. Just let them—”

A shout of alarm came from outside the tent. The report of a gunshot rang out. Grissom straightened, letting go of Noboru’s hair. Another shot exploded, followed by more shouting, a confused clamor, the sound of boots running through mud. Grissom touched the eye of the dragon on the dagger’s hilt again and the two outer blades slid back into the handle. He tossed the dagger back in the wooden box. “Watch them,” he barked at the guard stationed at the tent flap. Then he exited.

“How could you?” Joyce said. “Both of you! If he finds the other gemstones and activates the Spearhead, he’ll use it to slaughter thousands—maybe millions.”

“I’m sorry,” Noboru said. “But I couldn’t let him kill you.”

More angry shouts erupted outside, more gunfire, and another sound, like the twanging of a guitar string.

“What the hell is going on out there?” Joyce asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The guard stiffened suddenly and a strange gurgling came from his throat. He fell backward, clutching at his neck. The shaft of an arrow protruded from his Adam’s apple.

The dying man’s fingers grabbed at the tent flap, pulling the canvas to one side.

Just long enough for Gabriel to see someone run past holding a wooden longbow, a quiver of arrows strapped to the back of his white robe.

A skull mask covered his face.

Chapter 10

The cult, here? Now? Gabriel had never thought he’d be grateful to see them. But it was only a temporary reprieve. Both groups wanted them dead and whichever came out on top would see to it that they wound up that way.

“This can’t end well,” Gabriel said. “We have to get out of here.”

Noboru pulled hard against the ropes tying him to his chair, to no avail. “Any suggestions?”

Gabriel eyed the table with the box on it. “One. But it depends on my getting over there.” He began rocking back and forth in his chair, tipping it farther and farther until it finally fell forward. He shifted as he fell so that he landed on his side. The jolt of the impact made the fresh cuts on his torso flare with pain again.

He wriggled on the ground, making slow progress toward the table, dragging the chair with him. The strain it put on his shoulders made it feel like they would snap out of their sockets at any moment. He backed up against the table and knocked the chair into it as hard as he could. The wooden box on top shifted but didn’t fall. He hit the table again, gritting his teeth against the pain. The box jolted, crept closer to the edge. Looking up, he saw that it was within centimeters. He struck the table one more time. The box jumped, teetered on the edge. Come on, damn it…It teetered on the table’s edge, then fell. He swung his head to the side and it smashed beside him, kicking off splinters. One nicked his ear as it shot past. Grissom’s ivory-handled dagger spilled out on the floor and rolled a yard or so. He rotated till it was in reach of one of his feet, then kicked it toward Noboru. The other man caught it between his boots.

More shouting came from outside the tent. Gabriel could hear people running past, the crack of gunfire and the shuk of arrows landing in the mud. They had to hurry. All it would take was one cult member to stumble upon them, or one of Grissom’s men to catch them in the middle of an escape attempt, and they might as well have spent the time digging their own graves.

“Turn it around,” he told Noboru. “The other way. Upright.” With the sides of his boot soles, Noboru turned the knife till it was pointing straight up. He steadied the pommel against the ground. Gabriel squirmed painfully back to him, angling himself so his back was to the blade. “Just hold it steady,” he said. “Despite the position we find ourselves in, I don’t really want to slit my wrists.” He started working the rope holding his arms together against the blade. The angle was difficult, and it hurt like hell to raise and lower his arms, but after half a minute he could feel the tension in the rope weakening.

“Go faster,” Joyce called. “You’ve got to go faster.”

Gabriel grimaced. It felt like his arms were about to break. He thrust the ropes against the blade savagely—again—once more—and suddenly his hands were free. He threw the rope off to either side and scrambled to his feet. He grabbed the knife and pressed the hidden button. The extra blades snapped into view. He used their razor edges to make short work of the ropes holding Noboru and Joyce to their chairs.

“We’ve got to get the Star back,” she said, rubbing circulation back into her wrists.

“The only problem,” Gabriel said, “is that there’s a battlefield between us and wherever Grissom’s got it. Assuming he’s not lying facedown in the mud.” We should be so lucky. Gabriel crossed to the tent flap, stepping over the dead guard, and pulled it back an inch to peer out. It was chaos outside, with Grissom’s men running back and forth, shouting and firing their weapons. Everywhere, the feathered ends of arrows stuck up out of the ground like tire spikes. One of Grissom’s men ran past, pistol in hand, shooting at a target Gabriel couldn’t see, and then an arrow hit him in the back. The man fell forward, his body skidding to a halt in the mud. The arrow had come from the direction of the jungle. Aside from the one cult member he’d seen running past the tent, it looked like the others were hanging back and trying to pick off Grissom’s men from the trees. There was no sign of Grissom himself, or of Julian.

“I can’t see much from here,” he said. “We have to move, find a better vantage point. Someplace a little safer, too.”

Gabriel handed Grissom’s dagger to Noboru. “Here, take this.”

Noboru weighed it in his hand and nodded. “What about you?”

“I’ll find something.” Gabriel looked outside again. The chaos hadn’t abated. He saw a jeep full of Grissom’s men barreling toward them.

“When I say run, run,” Gabriel said. Joyce and Noboru nodded. He waited until the jeep was just before the tent, the gunmen in back firing into the trees, and then shouted, “Run!”

He threw open the tent flap and sprinted out into the open, using the passing jeep for cover. Joyce followed right behind him, then Noboru. Gabriel kept running, head down, pumping his legs as hard as he could to carry him toward a tent directly across the open center of the camp. Arrows hissed through the air toward them, one going by directly over his head and three more embedding themselves in the ground near his feet.

When he reached the other tent, he ducked around the corner. Joyce and Noboru dove for cover behind him, breathing hard.

“Where to now?” Joyce asked.

Gabriel peeked out. He had a better view of the scene from here. Dead bodies littered the ground, mostly Grissom’s men but also a few members of the Cult of Ulikummis, their white robes stained with mud and gore. Grissom’s remaining soldiers were running for the jeeps, squeezing off shots into the forest as they went. Arrows continued to fly from the trees, though not as many as before. Gabriel couldn’t make out the cultists’ positions in the trees. For men whose choice of camouflage was more suited to the Arctic, they did a hell of a job of blending in.

The jeeps pulled out and roared toward the tree line, the men standing in back exchanging their pistols for shotguns. He didn’t see Grissom or Julian in any of them. Had they already evacuated the camp?

No, Gabriel thought. Grissom wouldn’t. He was too stubborn and arrogant to alter his plans just because he suddenly found himself under siege. He’d still be in the camp somewhere, letting his henchmen fight for him while he…

While he what?

The Star. Grissom had gotten a portion of what he needed from Noboru and would be trying to use the Star and the map even now, in the middle of a pitched battle, to get as much information as possible before moving on. Gabriel looked around. At the far end of the camp, he spotted a tent with two gunmen posted outside. Everyone in Grissom’s army was fighting the cultists except those two. They were protecting something. Or someone.

“There,” he said, pointing.

“How will we get past the guards?” Joyce asked.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “We’ll think of something.” He led them behind the row of tents, hoping the jungle beside them wasn’t filled with cultists waiting to unleash their arrows. He kept his head down and hurried, counting on the continuing gunfire to cloak the sound of their running footsteps. He stopped one tent short of their destination, motioned to the others to stay low, then peeked around the corner.

The guards. How to get past—

At that instant, an arrow flew out of the jungle and landed squarely in the chest of the guard on the left. He crumpled to the ground. The other guard turned and started shooting into the trees.

“Now,” Gabriel said.

While the guard’s back was turned, they ran toward the tent. Halfway there, Gabriel glanced back and spotted an arrow cutting through the air in a perfect arc right toward Joyce. He spun and tackled her around the knees, pulling her down into the mud. The arrow whizzed through the air where she’d been.

Unfortunately, their motion caught the surviving guard’s attention. His mouth fell open in surprise and he swung his pistol toward them. Noboru, still running, hurled the dagger. It spun end over end, its triple blade glinting in the sun before sinking with a meaty thock into the guard’s chest. The guard dropped his gun, tilted his head down to look at the ivory handle sticking out of his chest, and dropped to his knees. He tipped forward, landing in the dirt.

Gabriel helped Joyce stand up. Her hand felt small in his and he could feel it trembling. Together they ran toward the tent, staying low. He didn’t let go of her hand till they’d made it to the tent’s entrance. He was acutely aware of her gaze on him, those piercing blue eyes staring out at him from her mud-caked face.

“You saved my life back there,” she said. “Again.”

He bent to pick up one of the guards’ guns. Next to him, Noboru pulled the dagger out of the guard’s chest and wiped the blood on the corpse’s shirt. “Easy,” Gabriel whispered. “Not a peanut in sight.”

Gabriel put a finger to his lips, then slid the muzzle of the guard’s pistol through the tent flap and nudged it aside an inch.

Inside, a half dozen chairs and a pair of folding tables had been pushed to the side. Grissom stood in the empty center of the tent, looking down at something on the floor. It had to be the map. When Grissom shifted position, Gabriel saw he was holding the Star of Arnuwanda over the map with one hand and shining a flashlight through it with the other. So he’d figured out that much. Gabriel moved slightly for a better view of the tent’s interior. He saw Julian standing with his back to them. The grip of his Magnum was visible at the waistband of his pants. He had his hands up at chest height and it looked like he was writing something down. Coordinates of the second Eye? Just how far had they gotten?

There was no time to waste. Gabriel stepped through the flap and had his arm around Julian’s neck before he could turn around. The pen and paper he’d been holding fell to the floor. Gabriel pulled Julian’s Magnum from his belt, dropped it and kicked it behind him so it slid under the tables. “Remember when I said you better hope I never see you again?” he whispered in Julian’s ear. “I wasn’t kidding.” He dug the barrel of the guard’s gun into Julian’s ribs. Julian’s eyes widened.

Grissom spun around, dropping the flashlight but keeping a tight grip on the Star. His eyes darted toward a table by the wall, where their confiscated weapons lay: the two Colts, Noboru’s knife, even the flare gun from the jeep. Grissom made a break for the weapons, but Noboru, darting in, managed to get between him and the table. He raised the dagger. Grissom turned to run the other way and found Joyce blocking his path. She lifted the second guard’s gun.

Joyce held out her other hand palm up. “The Star,” she said.

Grissom looked over at Julian gasping for breath in Gabriel’s choke hold, then at Noboru, who had snatched up one of the Colt revolvers from the table and was pointing it at him. He swallowed hard and held out the Star. “This isn’t over,” he said.

Joyce reached out to take the Star. Grissom started coughing so hard he doubled over, his forearms on his knees. As Joyce bent to pull the Star out of his hand, Grissom swung it at her. The heavy metal disk connected with her stomach, and she went down, the gun skittering out of her grasp. But she managed to hold onto the Star. For an instant, Grissom looked like he was going to try to get it back from her, but she rolled over, clutching it to her chest and cradling it beneath her. Noboru drew back the safety on his Colt and advanced on him. Grissom settled for snatching up the pistol at his feet and, shooting it blindly in Noboru’s direction, bolted through the tent flap. Ducking, Noboru fired off two shots that punched holes in the canvas but it was too late—Grissom was gone.

Joyce stood again, brushing dirt off the artifact in her hands. “It’s all right. Let him go. The Star’s the only thing that matters.”

“Not exactly,” Gabriel said. “Getting out of here alive matters, too.” Julian was still struggling in Gabriel’s choke hold. “Looks like your father left you all alone,” Gabriel said into Julian’s ear. “What do you suppose we should do with you? What would you do to us if our positions were reversed?”

Julian squirmed against his arm, but the hold was too tight. Gabriel started to squeeze, cutting off his air supply, and Julian clawed at him. Then Julian snapped his elbow back into Gabriel’s gut. Normally it would have been the sort of blow he could take easily—but the cuts on his abdomen turned it into a symphony of pain. Gabriel doubled over. But he held on tight, clamping down on Julian’s throat. The younger man struggled wildly, but Gabriel didn’t give an inch. After a minute, the struggles slowed and finally stopped.

“Is he…?” Joyce said

“Not to say I’m not tempted, but no,” Gabriel said. “Just unconscious.” He lowered Julian to the ground and tore the unconscious man’s collar open. He pulled the Death’s Head Key from around his neck. He hung it around his own. Then he took his Colt .45 and holster from the table and buckled it on while Noboru did the same with his knife and ankle sheath. Noboru also stuffed the flare gun into his belt. While they were doing this, Joyce was rifling through everything else on the tables, overturning boxes, opening document folders, and throwing them to the ground in frustration.

“What is it?” Noboru asked.

She bent over Julian’s unconscious body and patted the pockets of his cargo vest, then his pants.

“The jewel,” she said. “The Eye. It’s gone.”

“Grissom must have it on him,” Gabriel said. He looked outside. The battle was still raging, but there was no sign of Grissom. “We can’t go after him now. We need to get out of here.”

They exited the tent cautiously, headed toward Noboru’s jeep. Gabriel stayed low, his revolver in his fist, Noboru by his side, Joyce directly behind him. They reached the jeep without incident. Just as Noboru jumped into the driver’s seat, though, a muffled scream from behind Gabriel made him turn.

Another jeep had rolled up out of nowhere; there were three men inside. One of the three was leaning out and had snatched Joyce off her feet with an arm around her waist and the other clamped over her mouth. She was lifted, struggling and screaming, into the vehicle.

“Joyce!” Gabriel shouted. She still had the Star in her hands, and she tried to throw it to him, but the man holding her slapped her hands down. The driver stomped on the gas then and the jeep rocketed forward, vanishing into the distance even as Gabriel fruitlessly chased after it on foot. Borneo covered two hundred eighty-eight thousand square miles, with plenty of places to hide a struggling captive—or to bury one. If they didn’t catch the other jeep quickly, they would lose the Star and Joyce for good.

Chapter 11

Gabriel whirled around and saw Noboru, ten yards back, starting the jeep’s engine. Noboru pulled out, spun the jeep to face him and sped toward him. Arrows zipped over the jeep, banged off the hood. Gabriel ran toward it as it approached. He grabbed the side of the jeep as it skidded to a halt, pulled himself up onto the side bar and jumped over the door into the passenger seat.

Behind him and off to one side, a white-robed man emerged from the jungle and ran toward them, a long, curved sword swinging overhead in both hands. The mud didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all.

Noboru cranked the gearshift and stepped on the gas. “Hold on to something!” he shouted. Gabriel dropped back into his seat as the jeep picked up speed. The man darted into their path, running toward them as they accelerated. At the instant they ought to have hit him, he leapt lightly onto their front bumper, then from there onto the jeep’s hood, swinging the sword at Noboru’s head. Gabriel pulled the trigger on his Colt. The man flew backward from the impact. He landed in the mud several feet away and didn’t get up again.

Noboru spun the wheel, turning them back toward the path that led to the main road. Gunfire crackled around them as they sped past a last cluster of Grissom’s men shooting at the cultists in the trees. “What are they doing here?”

“They must have followed us,” Gabriel said. “But they can’t just be after us for taking Joyce away from them. It’s got to be the Star they want. Everybody’s after that damn thing.”

Noboru raced along the jungle path, leaving the camp behind, and turned onto the main road. It ran for at least a mile straight ahead, and in the distance they saw the other jeep barreling along it in the direction of Balikpapan. Noboru increased his speed, the two of them bouncing and jostling in their seats as the jeep raced over the unpaved road.

“Get right up next to them,” Gabriel shouted over the engine’s roar as they closed on the other jeep. He aimed his Colt again, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to risk hitting the driver. If they went off the road, Joyce could be killed in the crash.

Noboru narrowed the gap between the two vehicles, the jeep shuddering under the strain like it was about to fall apart.

As they drew closer, Gabriel saw Joyce and one of Grissom’s men, a big man with a close-cropped beard, struggling in the back. The man was trying to get the Star away from her, but she was clinging to it, spitting curses and kicking at him. The man swung at her with his free hand, clocking her in the side of the head and she cried out, but didn’t lose her grip on the Star.

Noboru pulled up beside the other jeep, matching its speed. Gabriel stood, the wind whipping his hair. He balanced himself against the roll bar and kept an eye on the space between the vehicles, knowing a single misstep would send him hurtling to the road below.

The bearded man punched Joyce again. This time she fell onto the backseat, finally releasing her grip on the Star; this sent the man reeling back too.

“Joyce!” Gabriel shouted. Her head popped up over the side of the jeep. He held out his arms. “Jump!”

“Not without the Star,” she shouted back.

The man in the passenger seat, a short, evil-looking fellow with a long scar down his cheek, reached for her, but she knocked his hands aside.

“You have to jump,” Gabriel shouted. Then, to Noboru, “Get us closer!”

Noboru brought them as close as he could without contacting the other car’s chassis. The other driver glared at him and stepped on the accelerator. Noboru fell behind for a moment, then pulled up alongside again. Joyce stood in the back of the jeep, staring with a look of terror at the road ripping by between them. Behind her, the bearded man got back on his feet, holding the Star. Tucking it under one arm, he reached for her with the other.

“Now,” Gabriel yelled.

Glancing back—could she really leave the Star in their hands?—Joyce took a deep breath, put one foot on the backseat and launched herself into the air. Noboru cursed, trying to keep the vehicle steady. Joyce cried out as she hurtled toward them and slammed into Gabriel, nearly knocking him over. With one arm around the roll bar for support, he wrapped the other around her to hold her steady. She breathed hard in his ear.

“The Star,” she said. “We can’t leave it with them.”

“We won’t,” Gabriel said. He let go of her. She dropped into the seatwell. In the other jeep, Grissom’s men were shouting at each other. Their vehicle turned suddenly, moving farther away, toward the edge of the road. The man in the front passenger seat leveled a handgun at them and fired. Bullets punched craters in the door and ricocheted off the roll bar inches from Gabriel’s head.

“Stay on them!” he shouted to Noboru.

They swung closer again, and when the two jeeps were side by side once more Gabriel jumped across the divide. He landed on top of the bearded man in back, tackling him to the floor. The Star dropped from the man’s hand and rolled under the driver’s seat. Gabriel and the bearded man stood up at the same time, the bumps in the road as they raced along it threatening to knock them off their feet again.

The other man punched first, but Gabriel caught his fist in his hand and brought his knee up into the man’s gut. He doubled over, and Gabriel haymakered him on the back of the neck, driving him to the floor. The scar-faced man in the passenger seat stood up and climbed over his seat into the back of the jeep, brandishing his gun. Gabriel backhanded it out of his grip before he could fire. It clattered to the floor, landing between the front seats. The man punched Gabriel, stunning him for a moment and sending him reeling back. The scarred man swung at him again, but Gabriel jerked his head back, the man’s fist just missing his jaw. Gabriel’s own fist connected, though, knocking his opponent backwards. He collided with the driver’s back and the jeep swerved dangerously.

The bearded man rose from the floor. He’d retrieved the Star from under the driver’s seat.

Gabriel elbowed him in the face and grabbed the Star out of his hands.

Looking over, he saw that Noboru had kept pace, their jeep jouncing alongside the one he was in. Joyce had her hands cupped around her mouth and was shouting something at him, but he couldn’t make it out.

Gabriel stepped up on the side of the jeep and was about to jump back when the bearded man grabbed him from behind, his thick arm snaking around Gabriel’s neck. Now he knew what it had felt like for Julian: his windpipe was compressing, the oxygen flow to his brain cutting off. The man reached forward to snatch the Star back. Gabriel couldn’t let that happen.

He threw the Star. Tossed it flat and spinning like a metal frisbee and watched it sail toward Noboru’s jeep. Joyce stretched for it, snagging it out of the air.

Gabriel elbowed the bearded man in the ribs and felt the hold around his throat slacken. He spun and punched the man in the jaw, knocking him back.

The scarred man rose from the passenger seat, meanwhile, climbed over the driver’s back, and leaped across to Noboru’s jeep, landing right next to Joyce. He grabbed her neck in one calloused hand and tried to seize the Star with the other. Noboru swerved the vehicle from side to side, trying to knock the intruder off balance, but the man kept his footing.

Her face turning red, Joyce hurled the Star just as Gabriel had. It flew back across the divide and into Gabriel’s hands.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel shouted, just before the bearded man threw a punch at him again. Jamming the Star under his arm, Gabriel sidestepped the punch and drove his fist into the man’s nose. He felt bone and cartilage snap and the bearded man fell back, blood spilling down his face.

In Noboru’s jeep, the scarred man let go of Joyce’s neck and turned to jump back across. Joyce grabbed at him, snagging a fistful of his uniform shirt and tugging fiercely. The man went off balance for a second and she tried to push him out of the jeep, but he regained his footing and stepped up onto the backseat.

He jumped across—and at the same moment exactly, Gabriel leapt back the other way. They passed each other in the air, so close that Gabriel could read the anger in the man’s face as he realized his mistake. Gabriel landed in Noboru’s jeep, grabbing the roll bar with one hand and holding onto the Star with the other.

The scarred man landed in the other jeep and whirled around. His face a mask of fury, the man reached down between the front seats and came back up with his gun.

Joyce ducked to the floor and Gabriel dropped into the passenger seat. Noboru spun the steering wheel, trying to put distance between them. A spray of bullets pounded the metal chassis of the jeep. Gabriel put the Star down and pulled his revolver. He fired off two shots, but they both went wide, missing their targets. He pulled the trigger again, but the Colt only clicked emptily.

The driver of the other jeep shouted, “He’s done! Finish him!” The scarred man lined up another shot.

Reaching behind him, Gabriel pulled the flare gun out of Noboru’s belt, swung it around in the direction of the other jeep, and pulled the trigger.

The scarred man ducked but Gabriel hadn’t been aiming at him. The sparking red magnesium projectile flew directly at the driver, slamming into his shirt. The man panicked as his clothing erupted in flames. He let go of the steering wheel and slapped at the burning flare. The jeep careened away, skidded off the road and slammed into a tree with an enormous impact. Seconds later, the site of the crash exploded into flame.

Noboru kept his foot on the gas. Gabriel turned around and watched the smoking wreckage disappear into the distance.

He handed the Star to Joyce in the backseat. “I believe this is yours.”

She took it from him and inspected it for damage. “I thought it was gone for sure.”

Gabriel leaned back in his seat, letting the wind cool the sweat off his body. “It nearly was. You nearly were, too.”

She gave him a look he found it hard to interpret. There was gratitude in it, but also indignation, as though she half resented him for saving her life.

Ahead of them, the skyline of Balikpapan rose up at the horizon.

Chapter 12

As they drove into Balikpapan, the city folded its arms around them in the form of skyscrapers and high-rise hotels, office towers and apartment buildings. Covered in bruises and blood, their clothes torn and filthy, their jeep battered and pocked with bullet holes, they attracted more than a few glances every time they stopped at a red light. Gabriel didn’t much care. He was glad to have a moment to breathe, away at last from both Grissom and the Cult of Ulikummis.

Neon advertisements on the sides of the buildings threw bright colors across the windshield and onto Noboru’s face as he grimaced and took one hand off the steering wheel to rub his chest.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked.

“It’s nothing, I’m fine,” Noboru said. “Just thinking about what my wife’s going to say when she sees our jeep.”

“I’m sure she’ll just be happy you’re alive,” Joyce said.

“You haven’t met Michiko. She’ll kill me herself.”

Noboru drove through the city center and over the hills until they reached the shore, where Balikpapan’s rampant, glossy urban expansion slowed and signs of its centuries-long history as a fishing village returned. The houses were smaller, more modest, and along the harbor dozens of fishermen were gathered, standing by their poles and chatting while they waited for something to tug at their lines. Noboru turned onto a lane that rose up the gentle slope of a hill lined with houses painted bright shades of red, yellow and green, their walls fashioned of thick cement to withstand the gale-force winds of storm season. He pulled the jeep over in front of a pale blue house with a white roof and killed the engine.

“Home,” he said, his voice unsteady.

They climbed out of the jeep, and Noboru fished his keys from his pocket. He tried to fit the key into the lock in the front door, but his hand was shaking and the blade kept sliding against the lock plate, missing the keyway.

“Is something wrong?” Gabriel asked.

“Michiko—” Noboru said, and his face twisted in pain. The door suddenly opened from the inside, and Noboru collapsed into the arms of a Japanese woman about his age. She cried out as she caught him, and glanced with confusion at Gabriel and Joyce. Gabriel rushed forward to help her carry Noboru into the house. They brought him through a polished wooden moon gate standing at the entrance to the living room and laid him gently on the couch.

The woman dabbed Noboru’s forehead with a tissue. “Who are you?” she asked Gabriel in Japanese.

“Your husband works with my brother,” he replied in the same language. “I’m Gabriel Hunt, this is Joyce Wingard. He was helping us.”

Michiko looked down at her husband resting on the couch, his face coated with a sheen of sweat. He was breathing shallowly. “It’s his heart. I told him this would happen.”

“Will he be all right?” Joyce asked.

Michiko pointed to a doorway off the living room.

“Bring me a glass of water from the kitchen,” she said, in English. “And a wet towel.” Joyce hurried off. Michiko knelt beside the couch. She reached into Noboru’s pocket and pulled out the small pillbox Gabriel had seen before. She opened it and took out two pills, small white tablets that Gabriel suddenly realized weren’t sleep aids but nitroglycerine pills. “His heart is poor,” Michiko said. “He had a heart attack when he was only forty-nine. It’s why he had to retire early.”

Gabriel frowned. “He didn’t tell me.”

“Why would he? He likes his job.”

Joyce rushed back into the room with a glass of water and a wet cloth and put them down on the table. Michiko gently opened Noboru’s mouth and slipped the pills onto his tongue. She tipped the water glass against his lips and made him swallow. “After we left Japan, I begged him to take it easy, just enjoy his retirement, not work for your Foundation. His heart can’t take the exertion. And it’s not as though we need the money—I make plenty, enough for both of us. But he insisted. He said if he didn’t do anything he’d feel like he was already dead.”

“Should we bring him to the hospital?” Joyce asked.

Michiko shook her head. “It wasn’t a heart attack, only an arrhythmia. The pills are enough. He’ll be fine, we just have to give it some time.”

“Are you sure?” Gabriel asked.

“Of course,” Michiko said, dabbing Noboru’s forehead with the wet cloth. “I’m a doctor.”

It didn’t take long for Noboru to come around, but when Gabriel asked if he was feeling better, he was too embarrassed to talk about it. Michiko cleaned Noboru’s wounds while he lay on the couch, rebandaging the slash on his arm and dabbing ointment on the bruises and cuts on his face. By the time she was finished, he had slipped back into a deep sleep, untroubled even by the snores Gabriel remembered from their night in the hallway of Merpati’s house.

Michiko tended to Joyce’s bruises next, while Joyce sat in a chair and chewed her thumbnail anxiously. Something was going on behind her eyes, but Gabriel still couldn’t quite figure it out. When Michiko finished, Joyce asked if she could use her phone. Michiko sent her back to the kitchen, where a cordless unit was sitting on the counter. Then she turned to Gabriel. “You’re next.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Gabriel said. “I’m fine.”

Michiko gave him a stare that said she was not in a mood to argue. “You look like you got it the worst of everyone. Sit.” Gabriel sighed and sat in the chair. She examined the cuts on his face, chest and abdomen, and shook her head. “My god, what did they do to you?” Gabriel winced as she dabbed alcohol on the wounds to sterilize them. Michiko nodded. “Someone cuts you to ribbons, but it’s the alcohol that hurts. I’ll never, ever understand men. At least you’re lucky: the cuts aren’t deep. You won’t need more stitches.”

“The man who did it was going for pain, not lasting damage,” Gabriel said.

As she cleaned his wounds, he turned to watch Joyce in the kitchen. She was leaning against the refrigerator with her back to them. She spoke into the phone so quietly he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“I don’t know what I would do without her,” Noboru said. Gabriel turned to the couch and saw Noboru’s eyes were open again. “Michiko, I mean.” His voice was weak and raspy, but he looked less pale than he had before, less clammy. He seemed to be regaining a bit of his strength.

Michiko glared at her husband. “I don’t know what I’d do without you either, you stupid old man. You’re not a boy anymore. You have a daughter, you have a family. I can’t have you running around, fighting, not when your heart keeps warning you not to. One of these days it’ll be a heart attack again, and then what? It’s bad enough you still smoke when you think I’m not looking.” She shook her head. “You have to think about your health—and if that’s not a good enough reason, think about me. In the morning, I want you to call Michael Hunt and tell him you’re resigning. I don’t want you doing any more work for the Hunt Foundation unless it’s stuffing envelopes.”

Noboru laced his fingers behind his head. “I’ll think about it.”

Annoyed, Michiko turned back to Gabriel and jabbed the alcohol-soaked cotton ball against one of his cuts so hard that he winced again. “He’ll think about it, he says.” She practically punched him with the bandage she applied over the cut. “This is all your fault. You and your brother. Don’t you care what happens to other people?”

“Stop it,” Noboru said. “If it weren’t for Gabriel, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“If it weren’t for Gabriel, you wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place.” She glared at Gabriel and he looked away. He couldn’t say she was wrong.

She picked up a double handful of used cotton balls and leftover bits of gauze, got up and carried it into the kitchen to throw away.

Noboru groaned and rubbed his chest as he watched her go. “Michiko has saved my life more times and in more ways than I can count. She’s a good woman. The best. You need to find a woman like that, Gabriel. Someone who’ll take care of you. Or have you found one already?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not the type to…” He trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence. He wasn’t the type to what? Let someone take care of him? Stick around long enough to find out? Both were true, he supposed. He’d lost more than a few good women over the years, women he’d cared about and cared for, who claimed they couldn’t compete with what ever it was that kept pulling him back to the forests and jungles, mountains and deserts half a world away. On top of that was an uneasy feeling that came over him whenever he got too close to someone, a fear that she’d be in danger because of him—or, maybe worse, that he’d be forced to give up being in danger for her. The way Michiko wanted Noboru to give it up.

“That’s too bad,” Noboru said. “You’ve saved so many people, Gabriel. When will you let someone save you?”

Gabriel leaned on the wooden banister that ran around the deck behind Noboru’s house, sipping warm tea out of a ceramic cup. A small backyard sloped gently downward away from the house until the lawn ended and the land dropped off in a steep incline. Beyond it he could see the waters of the Makassar Strait glistening in the twilight, and the lights of the oil refineries on the far shore twinkling like stars.

He took the Death’s Head Key from around his neck and looked at it. When Edgar Grissom surprised them in the jungle, he’d already known about it—he’d recognized Gabriel and known that Julian had taken the key from him. That was understandable. Gabriel was a public figure; a lot of people knew what he looked like from his appearances on television and the articles written about him. And of course Julian would have told his father what had happened at the Discoverers League. But—Grissom had recognized Joyce, too. And that was troubling. Why would Grissom know the name of a random graduate student on a research trip to Borneo?

That wasn’t the end of what was nagging at Gabriel. There was also the matter of how Julian had known Gabriel had come back from the Amazon with the Death’s Head Key, and where to find him. There was only one possible answer. Grissom was being fed information. Someone must have told him about Gabriel finding the Death’s Head Key, someone must have told him that Joyce was in possession of the Star of Arnuwanda.

Someone had sold them out. The only question was who.

“You’ve got that look on your face again,” Noboru said. He was stretched out on a lounge chair by the sliding glass door of the house, a cup of tea resting on the small table by his hand. “That ‘something’s not right’ look.”

“You’ve known me for how long? A few days?”

“I’ve seen it plenty. I’m guessing you wear it a lot.”

Gabriel smiled. “It’s nothing.” He didn’t want to worry Noboru.

Noboru raised a doubtful eyebrow and sipped his tea.

Gabriel looked through the glass door as Joyce finally came out of the kitchen. She’d been on the phone for nearly an hour. Michiko, sitting at a small breakfast table reading hospital reports, pointed toward the tea kettle on the range and Joyce poured herself a cup. Gabriel watched her walk toward them, holding the cup between her palms, blowing on the tea and taking a tentative sip. The bruise around her eye had grown darker, but Michiko’s treatment had kept it from swelling too badly. Joyce slid the door open, stepped out onto the deck and slid it closed again behind her.

She joined Gabriel by the banister and put her cup down next to his.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked.

She stared out at the water. The sky grew darker, the first stars appearing in the sky. “That was Uncle Daniel. He’s still working at the dig site in Turkey and wants me to come there. I think it’s a good idea. I can’t stay in Borneo—it’s too dangerous now. And besides, we don’t know how much Grissom was able to work out before we got the Star back. For all we know, he’s already on his way to finding the second gemstone. I can’t let that happen.”

“You want to go after Grissom again?” Gabriel said. “You barely survived this time. And he’ll be ready for you next time.”

She shook her head. “I know I can’t take him on. No, my plan is to get to the second gemstone before he does. Uncle Daniel can help with that. He’s got the resources and expertise. If anyone can help me find it, it’s him. He found the Star itself, after all.”

Gabriel reached for his tea and took a sip, taking the time to think. Daniel Wingard was certainly an accomplished archaeologist; he knew what he was doing when it came to locating lost artifacts. But Daniel Wingard didn’t know his way around a gun and wouldn’t stand a chance if he were facing one. He could probably help her beat Grissom to the second Eye of Teshub, and if this were a simple case of professional rivalry among colleagues, that would be enough. But Edgar Grissom wasn’t just another academic looking to notch up a publication for his CV. He had an army at his command and no compunction about leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. Even if they succeeded in finding the other gemstones before Grissom did, there wasn’t a chance in hell Joyce and Daniel would come back alive.

He tossed back the rest of his tea and put the cup back on the railing. “I can’t let you do this. Grissom is too dangerous.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You can’t let me? Didn’t we have this conversation already?”

“Let me clarify,” he said. “I can’t let you do this alone. I’m coming with you.”

She looked surprised. She started to say something, but Gabriel cut her off.

“You’re right,” he said. “Grissom can’t be allowed to find the other gemstones. If it exists, he can’t be allowed to get his hands on the Spearhead. It would be catastrophic, Sargonia all over again, only on a global scale. And, no disrespect to your uncle, but Daniel’s not prepared to face a man like Grissom.”

She studied his face for a moment. “You’re willing to put yourself back in Grissom’s crosshairs just for me?”

“And for your uncle,” he said. “And the rest of the human race.”

“And,” she said. “And.” She rose up on her toes, took his face gently between her hands and kissed him. Her lips felt tender against his.

“Joyce,” he said, “you don’t have to—”

“Oh, I didn’t do it for you,” she said, her voice all innocence. “I did it for humanity.”

She picked up her tea and walked over to Noboru.

“I can’t go with you,” he told her. He smiled sadly. “I wish I could, but…” He touched his chest. “Tomomi is coming back from Singapore to check up on me. I haven’t seen her in so long. But you’ll be in good hands with Gabriel. The best.”

“Thank you, Noboru,” Joyce said. She bent down and hugged him. “For everything.”

“Any time,” he said. “Just give me a chance to recover from this time first.”

She turned to Gabriel. “Uncle Daniel said he’s gotten us tickets for an early flight to Antalya tomorrow morning. They’ll be waiting for us at the airport. Get some sleep—I’ll knock at six.” She slid open the glass door and stepped inside.

After she’d slid it closed again, Noboru looked at him curiously.

“What?” Gabriel asked.

“Is there something you want to tell me about you two?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing to tell. She’s an old friend of the family, that’s all.”

“Really.” Noboru raised his eyebrows and took a sip of tea. “I guess she must feel she can count on her old friends.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear what she said? Her uncle told her he was buying two tickets. She knew from the start you would go with her.”

Gabriel turned to the glass door, but Joyce was already walking with Michiko down the hallway toward the guest room.

Chapter 13

Antalya was nestled at the inland tip of a large bay along Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. From the air, it looked like any other resort town. Gabriel saw enormous luxury hotels sprawled along the coast, each surrounded by swimming pools, golf courses and beaches. A few miles to the northwest was the country’s more desolate mountain region, where archeological digs had been taking place nonstop for nearly a century. Just a few years ago, he remembered, a new site of ancient Hittite temples had been unearthed in the western city of Burdur, and the remarkably intact foundations of a Roman village had been dug up outside Ankara. It was no surprise, then, that Daniel Wingard had been drawn to Turkey. How could any archeologist resist the seemingly limitless treasures still waiting to be unearthed? And he’d been right to come, given what he’d wound up finding, even if he hadn’t had a clue at the time what the consequences would be. The entrance of Edgar Grissom and the Cult of Ulikummis into their lives could be traced back to the moment Daniel Wingard pulled the Star of Arnuwanda out of the dirt.

On the ground, Antalya was a good deal less generic than it had seemed from above. The Mediterranean had a flavor all its own. The smell of the sea, the ancient sunbaked features of the people, the sounds of the Turkish seabirds calling to one another as they circled over the water. It was as warm as Borneo had been but noticeably less humid, the breeze off the sea like a cool fan on the back of Gabriel’s neck.

They deplaned and took a taxi to the Peninsula Hotel, in the city’s center. Thirty floors of concrete and glass that covered most of a block, flanked by smaller buildings on either side. Balconies dotted the building’s façade. Thick cement ledges, each carved with traditional Turkish designs, wrapped around the hotel in bands between the floors. It was the city’s highestend luxury hotel and as Gabriel and Joyce walked into the vast air-conditioned lobby, Gabriel carrying his beat-up suitcase, Joyce with her rucksack hanging from one shoulder, the guests sitting on the couches and at the bar by the piano turned to watch them, murmuring among themselves.

At the front desk, the concierge, a young man in a gray blazer, looked up from what he was doing and blanched. “Are you all right?” he asked in Turkish. “Do you and your wife require assistance?”

“We’re fine,” Gabriel replied in the same tongue. He could see their reflection in the mirrored wall behind the desk. Their faces were covered in bruises and cuts, and there was still a dark raccoon circle around one of Joyce’s eyes. “Just visited some rough spots before coming here.”

The concierge looked like he wanted to ask more but he was too well trained. As long as they paid their bill, guests were free to do what they liked, even if it left bruises. “You’re certain you don’t need anything?”

“One thing,” Gabriel said. “We need Daniel Wingard’s room number.”

The concierge flipped through a box of index cards, found one marked “Wingard,” and read through the notes penciled on it. “You are checking in to stay with Professor Wingard? Mister, uh, Hunt, is it?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “He’s expecting us.”

The concierge told them to go to the penthouse, room 3002, and pointed to the elevators. He offered to have their bags taken up by the bell captain, but Joyce snatched her arm away when he tried to take hers off her shoulder. She wasn’t letting anyone near it. Not while the Star of Arnuwanda was nestled inside, wrapped in one of her old T-shirts. They crossed to the elevator bank, hit the call button beside the silver-plated doors, and as they waited Gabriel watched all the reflected faces in the doors watching them. Were they just curious bystanders? Joyce had said the Cult of Ulikummis had members all over the world. It would make sense that they’d at least be in Turkey, the ancestral home of the Hittite Empire. Any of the men staring at them from the lobby might have his own skull mask hidden away in his attaché case or tucked in a drawer back home.

The elevator doors slid open and they stepped inside. They rode to the penthouse floor in silence, soft jazz playing through the speakers in the ceiling. When the elevator pinged and the doors started to open, Joyce said, “I’m glad you came, Gabriel.” She walked out of the elevator before he could answer.