Hunt at World's End

He followed her into a long hallway with plush carpeting and creamy silk wallpaper. He watched Joyce walk ahead of him and thought about how she’d slept through most of the flight from Borneo, turning in her sleep at one point so that her head fell against his shoulder. She’d looked calm, peaceful for the first time since he’d pulled her out of that cage in the jungle.

She’d looked beautiful.

Cool it, he thought, carrying his suitcase down the hallway. You knew her when she was seven, for God’s sake.

But she’s not seven anymore, another part of his mind pointed out.

They found room 3002 around the corner from the elevators. When Joyce knocked on the door, it swung open and Daniel Wingard rushed out, crushing Joyce in a bear hug.

“Thank god you’re all right,” he said. He looked her over, frowning over her bruises and black eye. “Oh, my dear girl, what did they do to you?”

“I’m fine,” Joyce said. “Really, I’m okay.”

“And Gabriel! Thank you for finding her, thank you!” He pumped Gabriel’s hand like he expected to draw water. “My god, look at you. I haven’t seen you since the memorial service. That’s what, eight years now?”

“Nine,” Gabriel said. “It’s good to see you, Professor.” Daniel Wingard looked exactly as Gabriel remembered him, if a little grayer on top and a little more wrinkled around the eyes and mouth. He was a full head shorter than Gabriel, with round features and the belly of a man who enjoyed hotel buffets.

“Only my students call me Professor,” he said, waving a dismissing hand. “It’s Daniel, my boy. Ambrose and Cordelia were among my dearest friends—I won’t stand on ceremony with their son. Now, come in, come in.” He held the door open for them.

Directly inside was the suite’s living room, an enormous chamber with arched doorways leading off on either side to bedroom and bathroom, study and kitchenette. Daniel had them to put their bags in the study, and when they returned to the living room he held out two glasses of scotch for them.

“Tell me everything, my dear,” Daniel said. “From the beginning, don’t leave anything out.”

While Joyce brought him up to speed, Gabriel sipped his scotch—it tasted smooth, smoky and expensive—and walked restlessly around the room. Hadn’t they gone over this on the phone already? If not, what had made that call last an hour? He didn’t begrudge Daniel the information, of course, but every minute they delayed setting off to find the second Eye gave Grissom that much more of a head start.

He walked over to a set of three metal cylinders standing against the living room wall beside a long wooden table. Each cylinder stood about three feet tall and bore a sticker in German that warned the contents were under pressure.

“Oh, be careful,” Daniel said, rushing over. “You shouldn’t touch those. They’re acetylene gas for the dig site. They only just arrived today, I haven’t had a chance to bring them over yet.”

“You had them delivered to your hotel room?” Gabriel asked.

Daniel nodded. “We’ve had a lot of items go missing from the site. It seems we have a thief on our hands, probably one of the local kids we hired. They can make a lot of money selling tools and instruments on the black market. They could get a lot for acetylene. Better to keep it here until it’s needed. Out of harm’s way.” He turned back to Joyce. “Same reason I sent the Star to you. Speaking of which, I am dying to see what you worked out, the way it operates with the map—will you show me?”

Joyce fetched her bag from the study, took out the Star and unfolded the map. “Grissom has the first of the Eyes—but you’ll help us find the second, won’t you?”

“Absolutely, my dear.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “To think that the Three Eyes of Teshub, the Spearhead, might all be real. How could I possibly say no to that?”

Joyce set the map on the floor. “We’ll need a light,” she said. Gabriel fished a flashlight out of his suitcase while Daniel went around the room drawing the curtains in front of all the windows and the glass doors to the terrace.

As Daniel pulled this last curtain shut, Gabriel thought he saw something, a movement glimpsed out of the corner of one eye. He looked over more closely. A man’s silhouette crouched outside—

“Get down!” he shouted, and Joyce and Daniel dropped to the floor. Gabriel ran for the curtain and threw it open. Beyond, the terrace was empty. He blinked in surprise.

Joyce came up behind him. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw someone,” he said. He unlocked the door, slid it open and stepped out onto the terrace, a rectangle of tiled cement enclosed by a waist-high brick wall. A table stood at the far end, its umbrella folded, flanked by two matching lounge chairs. There was no one in sight. With all the carvings providing handholds and footholds, the wall of the hotel would be easy enough to scale; and the neighboring terraces were close enough to jump to, or from. Someone could have been there. He scanned the row of terraces stretching to either side, then leaned over the edge of the terrace and looked down. No one. He turned to look up at the roof of the hotel, just above their room. There was no sign of movement.

Maybe it was just his nerves. He’d felt on edge in the lobby too.

Daniel poked his head out. “What was it?”

Gabriel walked back inside. “Don’t know. Maybe I’m jumping at shadows.”

Daniel slid the door closed and locked it again. “I’m not surprised, after what you’ve been through.”

Daniel may not have been surprised, but Gabriel was. He could have sworn he’d seen a shape moving out there. He glanced at the terrace one more time. There was nothing but sunlight and the cityscape beyond.

“Can we…get back to the…?” Daniel waved an arm at the map on the floor.

Joyce held the Star in position over the map and Gabriel switched on the flashlight. He angled the beam so the light passed directly through the artifact. Joyce rotated the inner ring till the projected cuneiforms began to line up.

“All right, I see it,” Daniel said. “That’s the one you found in Borneo, the one marked with the symbol for earth.”

“Right,” Joyce said. “Now let’s see the second.” She turned the central starburst further until the Nesili symbol for “water” was opposite her. She moved the Star until the symbol’s silhouette lined up perfectly with its twin below. The beam from Gabriel’s flashlight passed through the tiny green jewel at the end of the starburst’s shortest arm, sending a pinpoint of emerald light down to strike right in the open Mediterranean Sea.

“Mm,” Daniel said. He got down on his hands and knees next to the map and peered at the penciled-in grid. “The question is, what’s there? An island, perhaps?” He rose to his feet. “Wait here, I’m going to get my atlas.” He hurried off into the bedroom and returned a moment later with a big hardcover volume in his hands. “Here we go.” He sat next to the map again and flipped through the pages of the atlas until he found one showing a detailed view of the relevant portion of the Mediterranean. He pulled a small stub of a pencil from one of his pockets, licked its tip and made a mark on the page. “It appears to be about thirty-three degrees longitude,” he looked at the map again, then back at the atlas, “twenty-seven degrees latitude.” He made another mark and put the pencil down, frowning in confusion. “But there’s…” He looked at the atlas again. “There’s nothing there, just open sea all the way from Rhodes to Egypt.”

“There’s plenty there,” Gabriel said and he switched off the light. He fixed both of the Wingards with a concerned stare. “Remember, the first element was earth, and the crypt was underground. What we’re looking for isn’t on the water. It’s under it.”

Chapter 14

The cave smelled of spice and smoke. Deep in meditation, Vassily Platonov knelt before the altar, a low, flat boulder surrounded by candles whose flames illuminated the cave with a flickering glow. Incense smoldered from inside a stone brazier next to the boulder. With his headdress on the ground by his knees, he bowed his bald head in reverence. No statue of Ulikummis graced the altar. Such images were forbidden—theirs was a god of darkness and secrecy, his face so terrible it was said no mortal, not even his most devoted follower, could look upon it. Instead, resting at the center of the altar on a small woven blanket was a human skull that had recently been flensed of its skin.

In a low singsong Vassily chanted verses from memory—the ones he had been taught as a child and the ones he had only been permitted to learn upon turning twenty-one. He had recited them morning and night for decades now, and the words blended together as he sang them rapidly, his tongue flicking against his palate. With both hands he made the signs of Ulikummis and traced them along his chest. The time was coming near: World’s End, as the prophecies described it. When it came, the ancient stories would be played out again Just as Ulikummis had been born to defeat Teshub, Vassily had been born to become Ulikummis’s renewed vessel on earth, a shell for their god to inhabit when he once again descended to their plane to plunge the world into darkness and despair.

A rustle of movement drew Vassily from his thoughts as someone entered the cave behind him. “High Priest,” a voice said in Russian.

Vassily got up from where he knelt, placing the headdress back on his head. One of the younger brethren stood in the doorway, dressed in his street clothes instead of the ritual robe and skull mask. The young man was breathing hard and rubbing his hands anxiously on the thighs of his jeans. It was clear he had run to the cave with important news, but as with so many of the younger brethren, he had to be taught proper respect first.

“In the presence of our god’s altar, Arkady,” Vassily said, “you will address me in the sacred tongue, not the corrupt language of our adopted land. Is that clear?”

Arkady’s face flushed with embarrassment. “Yes, High Priest,” he answered in Nesili.

“Deliver your news,” Vassily said.

“We have confirmation our enemies have left Borneo,” Arkady said. “Our brother in the…” He paused, struggling to find words that didn’t exist in the ancient language. Vassily nodded, allowing him to substitute Russian words for them. “…in the airport reports both the man and the woman were on a flight to Turkey this morning.”

“And the Star of Arnuwanda is with them?”

“Yes. Our brother caught it on the…” He struggled for the words again. Vassily was losing patience with this young one, as he often did with so many of them. The younger generation seemed less interested in serving Ulikummis than in the mere fellow-feeling of being a member of the group—that and indulging in the occasional violence their god demanded. Vassily wearily signaled permission with a wave of his hand, allowing Arkady to use Russian words again. “Our brother caught sight of the Star in the baggage X-ray, but without privacy he could take no action at the time. The flight landed in Antalya this afternoon. The man and woman were spotted checking into a hotel.”

Vassily nodded. “Have our brothers in Turkey keep eyes on them at all times. I must be informed of their every move.”

“Yes, High Priest.” Arkady bowed stiffly. “Shall I gather the brethren and tell them to ready themselves for travel?”

“Not yet. Have the thieves followed for now, but take no action against them until my order.” Vassily picked his staff up from the ground. “What news of the others we fought? The army of outsiders?”

“They are gone,” Arkady replied. “They left us no trail to follow.”

Bad luck, Vassily thought. The first Eye was in their possession and would have to be retrieved. But the Star of Arnuwanda was the priority. It had to be captured at all costs. Only the Star could lead them to Teshub’s Spearhead.

Vassily returned to the altar, knelt before it. How foolish the old storm god had been, hiding such immense power from men in the name of mercy. Mercy was a word without meaning to Ulikummis, as the world would soon find out.

The boat was named the Ashina Tuwu and belonged to one of Daniel Wingard’s colleagues, an engineering professor at Akdeniz University who had made a bundle from an invention of his, something involving lasers. He reluctantly agreed to lend the boat to them. A Hatteras 77 Convertible, the Ashina Tuwu was more yacht than fishing boat, with black-tinted windows lining the flybridge, two luxury cabins belowdeck, and a streamlined white fiberglass hull that sliced effortlessly through the water as Gabriel steered it out of its mooring at the Setur Antalya Marina and into the open Mediterranean Sea. Traveling at a speed of 33 knots, it wouldn’t take them long to reach the coordinates they’d calculated from the map.

Daniel joined Gabriel on the flybridge, taking one of the riding seats beside the helm chair. Four state-of-the-art displays were embedded in the forward console just past the steering station: compass, speedometer, sonar, and a touch screen where the ship’s computerized system monitored everything from engine diagnostics to fuel transfer and tank levels. Gabriel would have preferred a more old-fashioned bridge, with fewer controls—fewer things to go wrong—but you made do with what you had.

“Where’s Joyce?” Daniel asked over the low hum of the engine.

“Belowdecks,” Gabriel replied, his eyes scanning the horizon. “She’s checking on the dive equipment.”

Daniel nodded. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t found her, Gabriel,” he said. “She came very close to dying, didn’t she?”

“Yes. We both did.”

“This isn’t what I wanted for her,” Daniel said. “This life. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy when she showed an interest in archeology and anthropology. In fact, I took quite a bit of pride in it, knowing I’d had a hand in it. Her favorite uncle.” He smiled weakly. “When she was younger, she would spend more time with me than with her parents. I would tell her stories about all the amazing things I found whenever I went on digs. You should have seen the way her eyes lit up, hearing about it. I knew even then that she had the bug. I hoped she might find a good university to teach at, do some traveling, work a dig site or two during her off time. The usual routine. But that’s not how it turned out.”

“What happened?” Gabriel said.

“You did,” Daniel said. Gabriel didn’t say anything, just continued steering. “I remember the day she brought me a copy of National Geographic and asked me if the man on the cover was the same boy she’d met all those years ago at my house in Maryland. I told her yes, it was. You remember that article?”

How could he forget? He’d only been on the cover the one time, shortly after his discovery of the tomb of the Mugalik Emperor. He hadn’t meant for it to become public, at least not as quickly and as widely as it had. But there’d been a spy in his crew, not in an enemy’s pay but in CNN’s, and his face had been all over the world the next day.

“After that,” Daniel said, “she never stopped following your career. All your adventures in the papers and magazines. That TV special on the Discovery Channel a few years back.” That unauthorized TV special, Gabriel thought. “She became obsessed with you, Gabriel. She headed off to follow in your footsteps, and she almost died because of it.”

Gabriel didn’t know what to say. He’d never set out to be anyone’s role model, least of all Joyce Wingard’s. But that didn’t absolve him of responsibility if that’s what had happened. He remembered her comment to him back in Merpati’s place: “You don’t know how I used to dream about hearing those words come out of your mouth…The great Gabriel Hunt, impressed.”

And he remembered the touch of her lips.

“I’m not blaming you,” Daniel went on. “She’s an adult now. She makes her own decisions. But I thought it was important for you to know. And if you were to talk to her, I think she’d listen.”

Gabriel shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean?”

“You might be able to talk her out of this life, Gabriel. When this is all over, convince her she’d be better off with a university job where the only attacks she’ll ever have to fend off will be to her funding, or her tenure application. Where she’ll be safe. She’s like a daughter to me, Gabriel. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to her.”

“I doubt she’d listen to me,” he said. “I don’t think she’s one for taking advice from anyone.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d try,” Daniel said.

Gabriel stood on the wooden planks of the aft deck, leaning against the steel railing with the sun beating down on his shoulders. In the distance, the Turkish skyline retreated toward the horizon until it was little more than a dark band at the far end of a field of rippling turquoise. The waters were calm. The nearest boat, a massive cruise ship anchored some miles away, looked like a bathtub toy. He felt the engine cut out before he heard it, the vibrations below his feet slowing to a stop. He’d left Daniel to steer and keep an eye on the coordinates; the man wasn’t a seasoned sailor, but he knew more about all the machinery in the pilothouse than Gabriel did.

As the Ashina Tuwu bobbed gently in the waves of its own wake, Daniel emerged from the flybridge and climbed down the steps to the deck. “This is the spot,” he announced.

“You’re sure?’ Gabriel asked.

“Have you seen the computers up there? This boat could find Amelia Earhart if you plugged in enough numbers.”

Gabriel nodded and turned back to the water. According to Arnuwanda’s ancient map, the second of the Three Eyes of Teshub waited somewhere below the undulating blue waves. He only hoped Grissom hadn’t beaten them to it.

Below the flybridge, the door to the cabin opened. Joyce stepped down the shallow steps to the deck, her hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She’d changed into a black bikini while she’d been below, and the sunlight glistened off her bronzed skin. She held an oxygen tank in each hand and planted them before Gabriel on the deck.

“I take it we’re here?” she asked.

“The exact coordinates,” Daniel said. “Assuming the map was correct to begin with and nothing has changed in the centuries since it was drawn, the Eye should be right below us.” He ducked into the cabin and came back a moment later with the rest of the equipment.

Gabriel and Joyce put on their scuba masks, fins and gloves. They hooked dive lights and small knives to their weight belts. Gabriel unzipped the nylon backpack he’d brought with him, pulled out the Death’s Head Key and hung it around his neck in case they needed it to deal with whatever was waiting for them down there. As he zipped the backpack again, the Star of Arnuwanda caught the sunlight, glittering at him from inside. Joyce had insisted on bringing it with them when they left the hotel. After all they’d been through, she didn’t want to let it out of her sight. Gabriel felt the same way about his Colt, which rested at the bottom of the backpack. Old habits died hard.

Daniel checked the tanks and regulators to make sure they were working properly, then brought them over to where Gabriel and Joyce sat at the edge of the deck. There was no railing behind them, only a short drop to the water below.

“There are deep trenches in the seafloor all along this part of the Mediterranean,” Daniel said. “If the structure housing the second Eye hasn’t been found in all this time, it’s a safe bet it’s at the bottom of one of them. I don’t know how deep you’ll have to go, but if the pressure gets too much for you, if you get lightheaded or sick, come back to the boat right away. Please—” He caught Joyce’s eye. “Don’t put yourself in any more danger than necessary. Worse comes to worst, we can always come back tomorrow and try again.”

“We won’t get a second chance,” Joyce said. She slipped her arms through the straps of an oxygen tank and straightened it on her back. “If we don’t get the Eye, Grissom will. Tomorrow’s not an option.”

Gabriel strapped on his tank too. “Keep the boat here,” he told Daniel. “And turn on the dive lights on the bottom so we can find you again.”

“Already done,” Daniel said. He turned to Joyce as she fit the regulator into her mouth. “Be careful,” he said. Joyce gave him the thumbs-up, then tipped backward into the water with a loud splash.

Daniel shook his head. “You see what I’m dealing with? She’s completely reckless.”

“I’ll try to bring her back in one piece,” Gabriel said.

“Yes,” Daniel said, “do that, please.”

Gabriel slipped the regulator into his mouth. He took a couple of breaths to test the action, then dropped backward off the deck and followed Joyce into the sun-warmed water. Though the salinity levels were low in this part of the Mediterranean, his scars stung as the water washed over them. A moment later the stinging subsided, or at least he got used to it, and he kicked his way deeper. Above him, bright red lights ran along the bottom of the ship’s hull, a beacon to guide them back. He spotted Joyce ahead of him, her body tipped downward, coursing lower into the depths where the shimmering columns of sunlight that broke through the surface grew diffuse. He hurried to follow her, angling his body and kicking his fins. The Death’s Head Key swung on the strap around his neck and floated behind him as he swam. Roughly four hundred feet below, he could make out swaying masses of seaweed at the bottom, and a dark, jagged crack cutting across the sand and stone of the sea floor. A trench.

Schools of fish darted around him as he descended, gray bullet tuna and long, thin silver garpikes parting to either side in undulating sheets. Joyce was still ahead of him, kicking her fins hard, not waiting for him to catch up, not even looking back to see if he was still there. At that moment, it was hard to imagine her giving a damn about anything he or anyone else had to say about her career choices.

He had to admit, there was a dichotomy to her he found intriguing. Sometimes she was funny, tender, even affectionate, and other times she was stubborn, single-minded, even hostile. It was almost as if she became a different person when they were in the field, like she was trying to compete with him, desperate to prove her mettle. It fascinated and frustrated him at the same time. He didn’t want to see her risk her neck again and again taking foolish chances, but it was when she was like this, barreling full steam ahead into the unknown, that he felt more drawn to her than ever. It was foolish, he knew. And a little uncomfortable—his family and hers had been so close she felt almost like a relative. Yet the more he was around her, the more he realized there was something about her he couldn’t shake. And didn’t want to.

Joyce continued toward the trench in the seafloor, her slender form gliding gracefully through the water. Gabriel followed, closing the distance between them. The water grew colder the farther they got from the surface and the reach of the sun. Ahead, Joyce passed into the shadows of the trench, disappearing from view. A moment later, her dive light went on, a bright shaft that cut through the darkness and illuminated her body in silhouette. Gabriel approached the mouth of the trench, pulling his own dive light from his weight belt and switching it on. A fat spotted eel dove into the sand to hide as he passed, descending into the trench, the darkness and cold closing in around him.

In the glare of his dive light, he saw rugged stone walls on either side. Tufts of marine plant life grew out of the cracks and swayed in the gentle current. The deeper he swam, the more the pressure built, making the bruises and wounds on his torso and face throb dully.

He caught up to Joyce as she passed a rounded outcropping in the trench wall. She glanced at him, her eyes hidden in the shadows of her swim mask, then shone her light deeper into the trench. The beam pierced the darkness for a hundred feet, then faded without touching anything. There was no telling how far they were from the floor, only that at this height the trench seemed bottomless.

The Death’s Head Key floated up in front of his mask. He reached up to push it out of the way, but before he could touch it the key jolted suddenly to the side. He pulled it down, but the key yanked up to the side again, too insistent for it to be due solely to the current. It felt like it was pulling against the strap of its own accord. He signaled to Joyce to follow him, then swam in the direction the key was pointing. It remained floating in front of him as he swam, which wasn’t right—his momentum should have caused the key to trail behind him.

He remembered the key leaping out of Grissom’s hand into the lock of the crypt in Borneo. Grissom had muttered a word Gabriel almost hadn’t caught.

Magnetized.

The key angled up suddenly as he neared the trench wall, pulling at the strap with such force that Gabriel thought the leather might break. He shone his light up and saw he was directly beneath the large outcropping, the rock’s surface slick with sea moss and thick weeds. Joyce swam up beside him, adding her light to his in illuminating the enormous stone above. The key kept tugging forward.

He swam closer, Joyce right beside him. The Death’s Head Key rose over his head, almost pulling the strap from around his neck before he could grab it. It was aiming itself directly at the outcropping. Gabriel released the key. It sped a few inches through the water and attached itself to the bed of moss.

Grissom had been right. Somehow the key was magnetized, responding to something in the outcropping.

He started pulling at the weeds around the key, tearing them off the surface of the rock. Joyce dug at the moss as well, scraping handfuls away. Together they cleared a wide swath, enough to see that the surface underneath was made of metal. As they pulled away more vegetation, it revealed itself to be a large, square hatch, decorated under a thick patina of rust with the same sorts of ornate designs as the door in Borneo. As before, there was no knob or handle, only a lock featuring the same peculiar triple-slotted keyway and the same etching above it of a skull with a diamond shape between its eyes.

Gabriel retrieved the Death’s Head Key from where it was stuck, quivering, in the moss and angled its three blades toward the keyway. The key leapt from his fingers to sink into the lock. Joyce looked at him in amazement. He tried to turn the key, but the pins and tumblers inside the lock hadn’t moved in thousands of years, and the water had all but rusted them in place. He kept forcing it, and just when he thought either the key or his arm would snap in half, he felt something give inside the lock. Using both hands, he managed to turn the key, first just forty-five degrees, then the rest of the way around. He felt a powerful vibration inside the door, then a heavy clonk, as of a bolt sliding aside.

Taking hold of the key, he planted both flippered feet against the rock and pulled as hard as he could. Joyce slid her knife into the edge between the hatch and the surrounding rock, to try to help wedge it open. It felt like he was trying to pull the entire outcropping out of the trench wall with his bare hands. The hatch refused to budge. He wondered if it even would be possible to open it after all this time. Then he felt something give. The hatch popped open a crack and slowly swung wide. Behind it, Gabriel saw nothing but pitch-black, a tunnel into the rock. He pulled the key from the lock, struggling against the magnetic force that tried to keep it in place, and hung it around his neck again. He shone his dive light into the opening.

Something moved in the distance, heading toward the hatch.

Joyce shone her light in as well, then recoiled and screamed into her regulator, sending a rush of bubbles over her head.

Long, white arms reached suddenly toward them, followed by the leering face of a skull.

Chapter 15

Gabriel swam aside to let the skeleton drift harmlessly past. It bumped against the trench wall and its bones broke apart, tumbling away loosely with the current. He turned his light on Joyce. She put a hand out and pushed the light away. In the brief glimpse he’d gotten of her face, she’d looked embarrassed.

It was nothing to be embarrassed about. Most people would scream if they saw a skeleton apparently swimming toward them, even if they hadn’t just spent five days imprisoned by men wearing skull masks. But here again Joyce seemed to need to prove she was every bit the hardened veteran he was. He just hoped this tendency on her part wouldn’t lead to her doing something that would be worse than embarrassing—possibly even fatal.

In any event, he wasn’t going to give her the chance to do so here. Gabriel swam into the tunnel first, the beam from his dive light leading the way. Joyce followed, shining her light along the walls. The entire stone outcropping was hollow, angling slightly upward from the hatch and extending some thirty feet into the trench wall. Rough alcoves had been carved into the walls on either side, just as there had been in the crypt in Borneo. Inside all but one alcove was a skeleton, wrists and ankles manacled to the stone. In the empty alcove, broken manacles hung where they’d once held the skeleton that had floated away. All traces of skin and clothing on the skeletons were long gone, and the Hittite armor they had worn when buried had corroded to shapeless patches covering their rib cages and in a few cases the tops of their skulls.

Gabriel’s heart beat faster at the sight of a familiar shimmering green light playing along the walls at the far end of the chamber. As he swam closer, he saw a pedestal on the floor, and atop it a huge emerald, the same shape and size as the one in Borneo, clutched in a similar stone hand. Like its twin, this jewel glowed from within, painting the walls around it with flickering green rays that illuminated a row of carved cuneiform symbols. Gabriel recognized them as the same Nesili words they’d seen in Borneo.

The light at world’s end.

The stone fingers looked like they had a firm grip on the gemstone; at minimum they had prevented it from floating away all this time. Remembering what had happened in Borneo, Gabriel examined the walls and ceiling for any sign of booby traps before touching the stone hand. Nothing.

He signaled to Joyce to keep an eye out, then pulled the knife from his belt. He placed one palm over the emerald to brace it and felt a strange vibration travel up his arm. What Grissom had felt, presumably; the power of the storm god, he’d called it.

Gabriel slid the blade of his knife between the emerald and the stone thumb. The hand in Borneo had had hidden hinges in the knuckles. If he could bend the thumb away, he might be able to pry the gemstone free. He pushed with the knife, trying to lift the thumb. It didn’t budge. He pushed harder. It was difficult to gain leverage while floating, but finally the thumb started to give. He slid the knife deeper between the emerald and the thumb and pushed again, but instead of bending on its hinge, the thumb broke off entirely. The oblong bit of stone spun away from the pedestal and sank slowly to the floor.

He put the knife away in its sheath and grasped the emerald carefully with both hands. With the thumb gone, he was able to shift the gemstone easily within the confines of the other fingers. He maneuvered it toward the space where the thumb had been and with a little finessing and a lot of yanking, he managed to pull it free.

Joyce swam over to him, her eyes flashing with excitement. She gave him a thumbs-up.

Movement at the corner of his eye brought Gabriel’s attention back to the pedestal. The stone fingers began to bend inward on their hinges to form a thumbless fist. Just like in Borneo, before they’d almost gotten buried alive in the chamber. He pointed in the direction of the hatch and started swimming, gripping the emerald tightly and kicking his legs as fast as he could. He glanced back to make sure Joyce was still behind him. Past her, at the far end of the underwater crypt, a panel in the ceiling was sliding open (damn it, he hadn’t seen a seam!), and a large, jagged stone fell through, moving at a tremendous pace as though hurled by some sort of spring mechanism. It smashed the pedestal beneath it and careened off the floor. Because the chamber was angled downward toward the hatch, the stone caromed toward them. It banged off the walls, smashing off shards of stone that spun through the water like shrapnel. Behind it, another stone, even larger than the first, shot out of the hole and barreled toward them in the first one’s wake. Then a third. Gabriel twisted back around and kicked as fast as he could toward the hatch.

The water slowed the speed of the oncoming boulders, but not enough. He’d seen the damage they were capable of doing. If one of them hit him or Joyce, they’d be pulped.

As they swam desperately along the channel, he felt Joyce beside him, tugging at his arm. He looked where she was pointing—at the alcoves with the skeletons inside. She swam toward one of the alcoves and started wedging herself inside.

Not a crazy idea on the face of it—hide in an alcove, let the stones pass—but in fact it would be suicide, for reasons he had neither the time nor the ability, underwater, to explain. Instead, he yanked Joyce out of the alcove she’d swum halfway into and shoved her furiously toward the hatch. She plunged through, disappearing outside. He gave one last glance over his shoulder and saw the first boulder bearing down on him. Gabriel launched himself through the hatch.

He made it through a fraction of a second before the boulder slammed against the hatch from inside, blocking the opening. The second boulder hit the first from behind a second later, then the third, and with each impact the metal frame of the hatch warped and bulged under the weight, forming a tight seal. If they hadn’t made it out—if they’d tried to duck into the alcoves instead of fleeing—there was no way they would have gotten out now.

Joyce stared at him through her mask, the look on her face once again tinged with embarrassment. Gabriel pointed toward the surface and started swimming up. Let her feel embarrassed all she wants. I promised her uncle I’d keep her alive.

A few minutes later he spied the bright beacon lights along the bottom of the Ashina Tuwu and headed for them. Joyce followed close behind. When they broke the surface, Gabriel saw Daniel rushing down the steps from the flybridge toward them. They pulled themselves up the ladder on the side of the ship, Gabriel clutching the emerald in one arm. He took the regulator out of his mouth and slipped out of the air tank’s straps, putting it down on the deck next to Joyce’s.

Daniel handed them each a towel and said breathlessly, “Dear god, is that it?”

Gabriel held up the emerald. “Right where Arnuwanda said it would be.”

“My God,” Daniel said, “it’s huge. It would be worth a fortune to any jeweler, never mind the historical value.”

“Right, never mind that,” Joyce said. She flipped her ponytail to her shoulder and squeezed the water out of it. “That’s only the reason dozens of people are trying to kill us right now.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Daniel said, still staring at the gemstone. He reached for it tentatively. “May I?” Gabriel handed it to him. “Oh, my word. Is it…vibrating?” He put his ear to it. “And humming? It’s incredible! I can feel something, like an electrical charge.” He shook his head in wonder. “Fantastic.”

Daniel handed the gemstone back to Gabriel. “I’ll turn the ship around. We should be back in time for dinner. I know a place on the Atatürk Caddesi. A bit pricy, but this calls for a celebration.” He climbed the steps to the flybridge again and disappeared behind the tinted windows.

Gabriel stood by the railing, letting the sunlight play off the facets of the emerald in his hand. They’d beaten Grissom to the second Eye of Teshub. That was good, but it didn’t mean they were out of danger yet. Grissom still had the first gemstone, and quite possibly had a better idea of where the final one was hidden than they did. Of course, even if Grissom found the third Eye before they did, the Spearhead was presumably useless, inert, without all three to activate it. But that only put their lives in further danger. It meant Grissom would come looking for the missing piece, and he wouldn’t stop until he had it.

Briefly Gabriel thought about whether they could use Grissom’s determination to their advantage somehow—maybe they could stay put in Turkey and let him come to them. But no, it was too dangerous. Grissom had too many men under his command, too many resources. Besides, Joyce would never go for it. Watching her walk toward him across the deck, tying a towel around her hips like a skirt, Gabriel knew exactly what she was going to say. He could have written the script for her.

“The third gemstone is still out there somewhere,” she said. “We have to find it before Grissom does. It’s the only way to keep him from getting his hands on the Spearhead.”

“You still don’t have any idea what that third element from the legend is?”

She shook her head. The light from the emerald reflected in her eyes as she stared at it. She lifted it out of his hands and cradled it between her palms. “Whoa! You guys weren’t kidding about the vibrations. How is it possible? It’s just an emerald, isn’t it?”

He cupped his hands around hers, feeling the gemstone’s muffled vibrations through her flesh. “I met a medicine woman in Paraguay once, one of the last of her tribe, who claimed to be able to use crystals to heal the sick. Her line was that all crystals are in a constant state of vibration, which gives them special conductive properties. She said it was what made it possible for her to heal her patients.”

“Did it work?”

Gabriel shrugged. “I don’t know if it was the crystals or not, but a lot of sick people got well in her care. Maybe it was purely psychological. Maybe there was more to it.”

“But you couldn’t actually feel the vibrations in her crystals, could you?”

Gabriel shook his head.

“So this is different.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Gabriel said.

“It’s like these gemstones are so charged up that they can barely contain the energy inside them. But what kind of energy is it? Where did it come from?”

“Don’t you remember the legend?” Gabriel said. “It came from Teshub.”

She laughed sarcastically, but only for a moment. He wasn’t laughing, and with the giant emerald thrumming powerfully in their hands, no explanation felt like it was worth dismissing.

They stood for a moment in silence.

“So…Gabriel,” she said, looking up at him. “Are we up to four now, or have I lost count?”

“Four what?”

“Four times you’ve saved my life.”

“Someone’s got to,” Gabriel said. “You keep risking it.” He smiled. “And what would the world do without Joyce Wingard to keep things interesting?”

A questioning look came into her eyes, for once an unguarded one, and she tilted her head back. There was no embarrassment in her expression now, nor any hostility. Her lips were slightly parted, and it was clear what she was waiting for. He bent his head forward and kissed her, felt her lips soft against his, her tongue slipping gently between them, her eyes sliding shut. She released the gemstone with one hand and moved it up to behind his head, her fingers curling in his wet hair. Her grip tightened and she pressed her lips harder against his—and then she broke away suddenly. She turned her face aside.

“I should…,” she said. Her breathing was unsteady. “I’m going to get changed.”

“Sure,” Gabriel said, though sure was the last thing he felt. “That’s a good idea.”

He took the emerald back from her and watched her walk to the door.

“I’m sorry,” he called to her. “I shouldn’t have…”

She glanced back at him over her shoulder. “What in the world are you talking about, Hunt? Of course you should have.” A half-smile played about her face, then she disappeared belowdeck.

He shook his head. What have you gotten yourself into now?

He opened the backpack and placed the gemstone and the Death’s Head Key inside. He looked up at the tinted rear windows of the flybridge. The ship had turned around, heading back for Antalya, and with the sun now on the other side of the bridge he could make out Daniel’s silhouette through the dark glass. He thought he saw Daniel move something small away from his ear—a cell phone?—and slip it into his pants pocket.

Chapter 16

If Daniel had seen their kiss on the boat, he didn’t mention it. In fact, Daniel didn’t talk much at all on their trip back from the marina to the hotel. It seemed unlike him, especially after he’d been so excited when they’d brought the Eye up. Gabriel, back in his street clothes, adjusted the heavy backpack on his shoulders as they rode the elevator to the penthouse and tried to guess what was going through the older man’s head. Daniel stood at the front of the elevator car, shifting his weight anxiously from one foot to the other. Something was definitely up; he’d have to ask Daniel about it when they were next alone.

Which they weren’t right now. Standing in the back of the elevator beside Gabriel, Joyce surreptitiously wrapped her fingers around his. He glanced at her, but she didn’t meet his eye, keeping her gaze forward and her face expressionless, entirely professional. The elevator pinged and the doors opened, and she quickly pulled her hand back.

Daniel led the way to his room, pulling the keycard from his pocket. He slid it into the lock mechanism on the door, waited for the little light beside the slot to turn green, and then pushed the door open. As they walked through, Gabriel saw Daniel raise his hands over his head. His heart sank even before he saw Edgar Grissom sitting on a chair in the living room, one leg casually crossed over the other. It wasn’t until the door slammed behind him that he noticed the other men standing in key positions around the room. Three stood near Grissom, another by the side table along the wall, and a fifth was behind them, covering the door. All five had guns drawn and pointed at them.

“Frisk them,” Grissom said. The man behind them left his post at the door and patted Gabriel down. Not finding anything, he moved on to Joyce.

“No weapons,” the man said.

Grissom beckoned. “The backpack.” Gabriel shrugged out of it and the man who’d frisked him carried it over. Grissom unzipped it, looked inside, and chuckled. “Excellent. The Star, the Death’s Head Key, the second gemstone, even your gun. I couldn’t have gotten a better gift if it were Christmas.” He lifted the emerald out of the backpack and regarded it in the light. “Once again I ought to thank you. You have done all the heavy lifting for me, Mr. Hunt. Killing you seems like such a waste. I really ought to hire you instead.” Grissom replaced the emerald in the backpack and zipped it closed. He smiled at Daniel. His hands, no longer raised, hung feebly at his sides. “Professor Wingard can tell you that I am a fair man to work with.”

Joyce’s face clouded over with anger. “You…helped him?”

Gabriel suspected his own face was displaying a similar combination of disbelief and disappointment. How could Daniel have sold them out? Not just Gabriel, the son of two of his oldest and closest friends, but Joyce, his own niece, whom he’d spoken so sincerely of wanting to protect. Or maybe he thought this was a good way to protect her? Get the Eyes and the Star out of her hands once and for all, never mind whose he was putting them in?

Daniel looked on the verge of tears. “I’m so sorry, my dear. You must believe me when I say that. Mr. Grissom contacted me a week ago, told me you’d been kidnapped in Borneo. He said he would bring you back safely if I helped him with his search for the gemstones.”

“And you believed him?” Joyce demanded.

“Why shouldn’t he?” Grissom said. “I’m a man of my word. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that the famous Gabriel Hunt had beaten me to it. Of course, even before I contacted your uncle, I already knew you were in possession of the Star of Arnuwanda, Miss Wingard. It’s amazing what spreading a little cash around can accomplish with the locals here in Turkey.”

Gabriel glanced at the three metal cylinders standing by the side table and remembered Daniel mentioning how the expensive acetylene gas was safer in his room than at the dig site because the place was full of thieves. Well, one of those thieves had signed their death warrants with a phone call to Grissom, and for what? A few extra coins?

Daniel turned to Gabriel, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I didn’t know you would get involved, Gabriel. I thought they would just take the key from you in New York and that would be the end of it.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Grissom laughed. “You mean you haven’t figured it out yet? How we knew you had the Death’s Head Key?”

Daniel hung his head and wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Tell me,” Gabriel said. Grissom started to speak, but Gabriel cut him off. “Not you. You,” he said to Daniel. “You tell me.”

Daniel took a deep breath. “You know I still talk with your brother from time to time, right? The last time, Michael mentioned that you’d gone to the Amazon to find the key. When Mr. Grissom mentioned he was looking for it, too, I thought…” He shook his head and looked at Joyce. “I’m no fool. I knew the kind of man I was dealing with. But I thought if I got him the key, it would ensure your safety. Please, Joyce, I’m so sorry. I only did it for you.”

She turned away from him.

“Please—”

Grissom smiled. “Don’t beg, Professor. It’s not seemly for a man of your experience. She is a petulant child and doesn’t appreciate what you’ve done for her.”

“Speaking of petulant children,” Gabriel said, “where’s your son? I’d have expected to see him here, carrying your bags.”

“Julian will be joining us momentarily, Mr. Hunt. I know how much he’s looking forward to seeing you again after your last encounter.”

The door behind Gabriel opened.

“Ah, speak of the devil,” Grissom said.

“The stairwells are manned, and the security cameras on this floor will be down for half an hour,” Julian reported. “Any longer than that and hotel security will get suspicious. We’re going to want to be long gone by then.”

“Well done,” Grissom said. He nodded toward Gabriel. “Our friend here was just asking about you.”

Julian came around. He had a gun in his hand and Gabriel saw that his throat still bore the angry red marks of the choke hold that had rendered him unconscious.

Gabriel smiled. “Nice scar.”

Julian turned the gun toward Gabriel’s face.

“Not yet, Julian,” Grissom said. “You’ll have your chance soon enough, my boy. But Mr. Hunt and I have some unfinished business of our own.” From his jacket pocket he pulled the ivory-handled dagger. He pressed the eye of the dragon carved along the handle and the two additional blades sprang out to flank the central one. Grissom rose from the chair, leaving the backpack on the cushion behind him.

“Step aside, Julian,” Grissom said.

Julian obediently stepped to one side—but in doing so, he came within Gabriel’s reach. Gabriel swept one hand up, grabbing Julian’s gun arm and yanking it so the weapon pointed toward the side table. The gunman standing there ducked aside, but he wasn’t the target. Gabriel squeezed Julian’s fingers against the trigger.

One of the acetylene cylinders exploded in a violent eruption of fire and thick black smoke. Everyone hit the floor except the gunman who’d been nearest to the table; a large piece of the canister’s outer shell sliced crosswise through his torso and pinned him to the wall. His clothing erupted into flames.

A shrill alarm sounded from the smoke detector on the ceiling. The sprinkler system turned on, drenching the room in a cold rain. Gabriel wrestled the gun out of Julian’s hands, sprang to his feet and broke for the chair across the room, where Grissom had left the backpack.

Undeterred by the sprinklers, the fire climbed up the wall, devouring the wallpaper and charring the wooden frame of the mirror above the side table. Thick black smoke filled the room. Gabriel felt light-headed, and realized the acetylene gas was mixing with the smoke. Through the haze, he saw Grissom kneeling and coughing violently into a handkerchief, the dagger on the floor by his knees.

Shapes moved in the thick smoke as Grissom’s men got back to their feet. Gunshots sounded. Gabriel heard a bullet zip past his head and smash a ceramic lamp by the couch. Another smashed the mirror into shards of glass. With Grissom’s men unable to see, they were shooting in all directions. He heard voices shouting but none of them sounded like Joyce’s. He’d lost track of her—but he didn’t dare call her name, not while the gunmen were looking for any indication of a direction to fire in.

He snatched the backpack off the chair and, hearing footsteps behind him, spun around. A man rushed toward him through the smoke, gun in hand. Gabriel swung the backpack, hitting the gunman in the head and knocking him to the floor. The man rolled away and came back up with his weapon blazing. Bullets tore through the air beside Gabriel, so close he could feel their heat on his skin. Gabriel lifted Julian’s gun, aimed into the center of the dark mass in the smoke and fired. The man fell and didn’t get back up.

Sopping wet from the sprinklers, eyes burning, throat raw, he slung the backpack over one shoulder and dropped to a crouch. A breeze from a shattered window swept through the thick smoke, clearing it a little, and he was suddenly able to make out two figures grappling on the other side of the room. One was tall and thick, the other shorter and with a ponytail flapping at the back of her head. Joyce! He saw her elbow her opponent in the side of the head. When the man fell forward, she brought her knee up into his face. He hit the floor hard and stayed there. As Joyce turned, another man came up behind her, snatching her off her feet.

Gabriel sprang toward them, but something grabbed him from behind. Hands wrapped around his throat and he heard Julian’s voice hissing in his ear. Gabriel tried to swing his gun around, but Julian batted it away. The gun slipped from Gabriel’s fingers and flew across the floor. Then Julian’s hands tightened around his throat again.

A massive explosion rocked the room. The other two cylinders, Gabriel thought—the heat of the fire must have set them off. The blast knocked Julian off his feet and Gabriel was able to pull himself free from the other man’s grip as they fell. Flames leapt across the wall and licked at the ceiling. More smoke poured into the room. He heard Grissom coughing again somewhere off to his side. Gabriel rolled away from Julian. His hand touched something hard. He grabbed it—Grissom’s triple-bladed dagger.

Gabriel stood, the smoke stinging his eyes. The gas in the air made him dizzy. He stumbled forward, hitting the sliding glass door that led out to the terrace. Closed. Gabriel reached for the handle to open it when he saw Julian lurching out of the smoke toward him, his hands extended before him. He’d found another gun somewhere and had it pointed at Gabriel’s face. Gabriel ducked, stepped toward him, and drove the dagger in his fist upward. He felt it sink into Julian’s gut. Julian collapsed on top of him, the gun falling from his hands. His face was just inches away and Gabriel saw the fury drain from his expression. In its place, shock. Fear. Pain. His mouth opened, and he drooped forward. Gabriel let Julian’s body slide to the floor.

Another figure came running toward him through the smoke. Gabriel groped along the floor for the gun Julian had dropped until he saw Joyce break through the wall of black haze.

“We have to get out of here,” Gabriel said as she reached him. A bullet whizzed past them, cracking the glass of the terrace door.

“Where’s Daniel?” Joyce asked.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said, “but I think he’s shown he can take care of himself.”

“Daniel!” she yelled.

“After what he did?” Gabriel said. “You still—”

“Daniel!”

A short figure rose up slowly from the floor nearby and Gabriel realized Daniel Wingard had been cowering behind the couch.

“Joyce,” Daniel said, coughing, “thank god you’re all right.”

Gabriel shouted in Joyce’s ear, “Give me one good reason we shouldn’t leave him here with his friends.”

“I can’t do that,” Joyce replied. “I can’t just leave him. Whatever he’s done.”

“Then he’s your responsibility, not mine.” Without waiting for an answer, he plowed through the smoke toward the door of the suite. Flames roared along the wall near the door, bathing them in heat. Gabriel put one arm up, covering his nose and mouth. He touched the doorknob. The metal was hot from the flames, but not too hot to touch. He turned it and pulled the door open. Smoke billowed out over his head as he thrust his head into the penthouse hallway, gulping air. The fire alarm was sounding even louder out here, wave after wave of shrill electronic pulses. Gabriel looked left and right, trying to spot the fire stairs. The prospect of climbing down thirty floors didn’t thrill him, but it was better than staying here.

He spotted the stairwell door at the far end of the hall. As he set one foot out of the suite in that direction, though, the door burst open—and men began pouring out, running toward him with guns drawn.

Chapter 17

Gabriel slammed the door shut and quickly fastened the deadbolt lock. It wouldn’t hold them out for long, but hopefully long enough to find another way out of here. He led them back across the burning, smoke-filled hotel room toward the terrace. Behind them, fists pounded on the door, barely audible above the blasting alarm. Gabriel slid the glass door open and shepherded Joyce and Daniel onto the terrace.

Joyce looked around. “Now what?”

Gabriel walked to the edge, skirting the table and chairs, and looked down. A crowd had gathered on the street below, pointing up at the smoke billowing out of their room. From where he stood, a column of terraces extended thirty stories down. As he’d noted earlier, it would be possible to climb from one to the next—for him, at least; maybe even for Joyce—but getting back inside the hotel would be a challenge. There was no guarantee anyone would let them into their room, and the glass of the terrace door had barely spiderwebbed even from multiple gunshot strikes—it wouldn’t break easily, not with just a couple of light lounge chairs to swing at it. And if they couldn’t get in, they would be sitting ducks, easy pickings for any of Grissom’s men who followed them down.

But up—up was another matter.

He dragged one of the chairs away from the table and placed it against the side of the building. He could hear Grissom’s men pounding and kicking the door. He had to hurry. Any moment they would switch to using their weapons to blast the lock open.

Even standing on the chair, the roof was too high for him to reach. However, there was a thick cement ledge, maybe ten inches high, running along the wall just below the roof. He reached for it, his fingers brushing the Turkish designs carved into the cement. The banging on the door stopped. He could picture them aiming their guns at the lock. He stepped up onto the back of the chair, got a firm hold on the ledge and pulled himself up. From there he hoisted himself onto the gravel and tarpaper surface of the roof. He bent down to help Joyce up, then left her to help Daniel while he took off the backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out his Colt. He put the backpack back on his shoulders as the sound of gunshots and splintering wood came from under them.

Daniel threw one fat, stubby leg onto the roof and hauled himself up, then lay on his back, huffing the fresh air and trying to catch his breath. Below, Gabriel heard the terrace door sliding open. Glancing over the roof’s edge, Gabriel saw Grissom’s men burst onto the balcony. Two of them raised guns his way.

“Move!” Gabriel shouted, ducking back from the edge as gunfire sped his way. Joyce helped Daniel to his feet, and the three of them ran across the roof, the gravel crunching under their heels. The hotel covered the better part of a city block and in the light of the setting sun, the roof seemed to extend forever. Halfway across, he ducked around a metal shed to find the roof access doorway, but it was locked from the inside. He rattled the knob once and kept moving. Behind them, Grissom’s men were still climbing up from the terrace below. Ahead, an obstacle course of turbine roof ventilators stretched for yards like a sea of low, gray onion domes. He started weaving around them as bullets began flying their way. Fortunately, climbing up to the roof had slowed Grissom’s men, so there was room enough between them to make aiming hard. But the sprint had taken its toll: Daniel was already out of breath and lagging behind, and Joyce was hanging back to help him. “Come on,” Gabriel said. “They’ll catch up if—”

The roof access door slammed open. Half a dozen men ran out onto the roof in pursuit. Gunshots cracked. Bullets ricocheted off the ventilators, dug into the gravel at their feet. Gabriel stopped, raising his Colt, but he couldn’t get a clear shot with Joyce and Daniel in the way. He let them rush by, then fired. One of the gunmen spun and fell. The others kept coming, filling the air with bullets. Gabriel ran, keeping his head down. A bullet ricocheted off a ventilator by his feet.

The field of ventilators ended and, a moment later, he saw the edge of the roof approaching. Joyce reached it first, skidding to a halt. She looked down, turned back to Gabriel.

Gabriel stopped at the edge, his heart pounding. He looked over and saw the white cement roof of the apartment building that abutted the hotel. The drop looked to be about fifteen feet. He could hear the shouts of the gunmen drawing closer. Their only chance was to keep moving.

“You’re going to have to hang down and drop. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. Go!” Joyce climbed over the edge, holding onto the concrete rim with a white-knuckled grip. Out of the corner of his eye, Gabriel saw Daniel doing the same. Gabriel covered them, picking his shots carefully. He only had so many bullets, so he had to make each shot count. “Are you down?” he shouted. Joyce’s voice came from a distance: “Yes.”

Gabriel swung around and without pausing to look, jumped off the roof. He braced himself for a hard landing and rolled as his feet hit the surface below. The impact was jarring and one of his palms got badly scraped, but he lurched back to his feet and kept running, sprinting after Joyce and Daniel. They were climbing over a low brick wall separating this building from the next. Behind him, Grissom’s men reached the edge of the hotel’s roof and opened fire. Bullets chipped the cement all around him. He kept sprinting, pausing only once to toss a gunshot back their way.

“Gabriel!” It was Joyce shouting to him from the next building over. She had reached the roof access shed for this building and had her hand on the knob. “This one’s unlocked!”

He raced toward her as she pulled the door open. She stepped back with a startled expression on her face. An instant later, two burly men barreled out of the shed carrying axes in their hands.

Gabriel lowered his gun and hid it behind his back as they turned to face him.

“Miss,” one of the men said, “we’ll need you to stay back. You, too, sir.”

More men were emerging from the shed. They all wore the heavy rubberized uniform of the Turkish municipal fire brigade. One pointed in the direction of the Peninsula and they all began heading that way.

“Please make your way down to the ground floor, sir,” one of them said to Gabriel as he passed. “The fire is spreading. It isn’t safe for you up here.”

“No, it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Though I have to say, I feel a lot safer now that you’re here.” He glanced back. Grissom’s men had faded—they were nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 18

The cargo van rattled down a dark Turkish side street, carrying Edgar Grissom away from the Peninsula Hotel. He sat on the bare, corrugated metal floor in back while two of his men occupied the front seats. He coughed what he hoped was the last of the smoke out of his lungs and into his handkerchief. Any irritant only worsened his condition further. Back in the hotel room, he’d been immobilized for minutes, unable to do anything but cough and try to suck air into his lungs, air that wasn’t there. He’d been lucky that in the confusion he’d been able to drag himself to the door and out into the hallway. Another minute in that smoke…

Grissom looked at the specks of blood in his handkerchief, then folded it, stuffed it in his pocket, and finally allowed himself to look at the horror laid out across the van’s floor before him. Julian’s body still reeked of smoke. Portions of his clothing were charred. Ash dusted his pallid skin.

His dead skin.

The ivory handle of the dagger still protruded from just below Julian’s solar plexus. Grissom’s own weapon, modeled to his exact specifications after an ancient Chinese sacrificial dagger. They’d killed their own children, sacrificed them to the river gods, with daggers just like this one.

Julian.

He’d lost his wife to a disease that had cruelly taken her away from him little by little. And now he’d lost his son, his only child, the last of his family.

Lost him to Gabriel Hunt.

What Grissom felt wasn’t sadness. There was no mourning or regret. There was only a vast, cold emptiness inside him, surrounding a bright coal of burning heat. This was the vengeance he was preparing for Gabriel Hunt. He would nurse it, stoke it, keep the embers burning until the proper moment came—and then it would erupt into a proper conflagration. Erupt and sweep Hunt from the face of the earth.

The man in the passenger seat turned around. Grissom recognized his face: Wellington, an American mercenary he’d hired back in Southeast Asia. Wellington said something, indicating the walkie-talkie in his hand, but Grissom wasn’t listening. He was watching his son’s head roll limply on his neck with every turn the van took.

“Forgive me,” Grissom whispered to the corpse. “Forgive me.” He pulled the dagger from Julian’s torso, the three blades sliding out smeared with blood. The weapon that had taken his son’s life would take Hunt’s. He would make certain of that.

“Sir?” Wellington said.

Grissom stroked his son’s blond hair. “There,” he murmured. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

“Sir,” Wellington repeated, louder.

Grissom looked up, his hand tightening around the dagger. “What?”

Wellington indicated the walkie-talkie again. “The strike team’s reporting they’ve lost the targets.”

Grissom stood, hunched over beneath the van’s low ceiling, and strode to the front. “What?”

“They lost them on the rooftops, sir.”

Grissom’s lips pulled back from his teeth. He lashed out with the dagger, slitting Wellington’s throat with one fluid motion. Blood streaked across half the windshield. The man in the driver’s seat flinched but kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t dare say anything.

Grissom snatched the walkie-talkie out of the dead man’s hand. “Find them!” he roared into it. “Kill the others, but bring me Gabriel Hunt alive!”

Gabriel reached the bottom of the stairwell and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Sirens shrieked from the other side of the block, where dark smoke roiled into the sky from the fire. Flames now consumed the upper portions of two buildings and it looked like a third might go at any moment.

Joyce emerged from the stairwell next to him. Daniel came last. He was out of breath, limping from the drop to the roof, and his face was red and sweaty from exertion. The three of them hurried down the street, trying to stay out of the light from the streetlamps.

“What do you think, how long till they come after us again?” Joyce asked.

“Not long,” he said. “Grissom won’t give up.” Not with his son dead, Gabriel said to himself. “We have to get away from here. As far away as possible, as quickly as possible.”

Joyce put her arm around Daniel’s shoulders, helping him limp along the sidewalk. “We won’t get far like this,” she said. “His leg is getting worse.”

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, sweat glistening on his forehead, grimacing with every step. “I’m slowing you down. You should just leave me and go.”

“That’s right, we should,” Gabriel said. “But your niece inexplicably still wants to help you, so we won’t.”

“I really am sorry, Gabriel—”

“Save it,” Gabriel said. “We can talk about what you did later. If there is a later.”

If they wanted to get away fast, they needed transportation. Cars were parked along the curb, but with the crowd around them and firemen and policemen in the street, breaking into one here would be too risky. Gabriel led them away from the hotel and onto a side street. There were no people here, the spectacle of the fire having drawn them all away. But there were cars, and one of them—a black, two-door sports car parked by the mouth of an alley—didn’t have an alarm light glowing on the dashboard. Perfect. Looking up the street to make sure no one was watching, he smashed the driver’s side window with the butt of his Colt.

He opened the door and tossed the backpack onto the rear seat. After brushing the shattered glass off the driver’s seat, he got in and ducked under the dashboard. He had the wires exposed a moment later, and the engine purring a few seconds after that. Joyce got into the backseat and let Daniel take the front, his injured leg requiring the extra space. Gabriel backed the car out of its parking spot and took off down the street.

He kept to side streets, passing dark apartment buildings and garages until they finally found their way onto the open road that led up into the hills. The apartment buildings turned into low one-and two-story houses, and eventually the houses thinned away until there was nothing but dark forest on either side. The headlights picked up signs marking the distance to Burdur and Isparta in kilometers.

“Where are we heading?” Joyce asked.

“Not sure yet,” Gabriel said. “I need to think.”

“My students!” Daniel exclaimed suddenly. “They’ll hear about the fire. Some of them know I was staying there. I have to let them know I’m all right.” He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and opened it, the blue key lights illuminating the interior of the car.

Gabriel snatched the phone from Daniel’s hand and tossed it out the broken window. “You’re not calling anyone.”

“Gabriel!” Joyce exclaimed from the backseat.

Ignoring her, he turned to Daniel. “You don’t go anywhere near a phone, a computer, a pair of tom-toms, anything. If I even see you with a tin can and a piece of string in your hand, I’ll shoot you. Do you understand me?”

Daniel nodded, staring out the windshield.

“Gabriel,” Joyce said, “that was our only phone.”

“We’re better off without it,” Gabriel said. “Grissom knows Daniel’s number. He could have used the phone to trace our location.”

“All right, so we have no phone,” Joyce said. “We have a stolen car, a gun with how many bullets left? Two? Three? And three exhausted people, one of whom can barely walk—and no, we’re not leaving him behind. So: What’s your plan?”

“We need a place to regroup. Rest a little, tape up that leg—” Gabriel nodded toward Daniel “—and figure out where the third Eye is hidden. No way am I letting Grissom get to it first.”

“You know any place around here where we could do all that?”

“One,” Gabriel said. “But if she turns us away, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“She?”

“A woman I used to know in Anamur.”

Joyce was silent for a bit. Then she said, “You used to know her…how?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“No,” Joyce said. “I guess I don’t.”

“Let’s just hope she’ll let bygones be bygones.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Joyce said. “How exactly did things end between you two?”

“Could’ve gone better,” Gabriel said. “The last time I saw her, she came at me with a meat cleaver.”

He followed the signs for Anamur, sticking to side streets, the darker and emptier the better. The detours made the trip longer than if he’d taken the highway, but he figured it was better not to risk being out in the open.

He didn’t know if Veda Sarafian still lived in her house by the sea, or how she’d feel about seeing him again after so many years, but he couldn’t think of anyone else he could call on—not in this part of Turkey, anyway. He drove all night, watching the stars fade and the sky gradually grow lighter. Joyce fell asleep in the back, her head tilted against the window, her hair hiding her face. In the passenger seat, Daniel’s head was turned away. Gabriel couldn’t tell if he was asleep or just unwilling to face him.

By the time the sun started to peek over the horizon, he had turned onto the winding coastal road that led to Veda’s house. The ground dropped off steeply to his right, and past the safety railing there he saw the dawn’s light glittering across the Mediterranean. In the distance he could make out the northern, Turkish half of Cyprus and, past it, a hazy sliver of Syria on the horizon.

He turned onto a narrow gravel drive, and there it was, the house, just as he remembered it. A low, two-story wooden home with dark shingles and white painted frames around the curtained windows.

“We’re here,” he said, setting the hand brake as the car slid to a stop. Joyce stirred in the back, and Daniel stretched, rubbing his neck. They exited the car and walked up the small flight of steps to the door. Gabriel could hear the gentle slosh of the surf from the other side of the house, where Veda had—or at least used to have—a low wooden dock that bobbed on the waves. He knocked.

A few moments later it opened, and a tall, slender woman with olive skin and deep brown eyes appeared. She didn’t look a day older than when he’d seen her last, or an iota less enraged. She brushed her black hair out of her eyes and regarded him with a look that could have ignited a fire in a rainstorm. “Gabriel Hunt?” She spoke with a smooth British accent, but that didn’t mask the emotion behind the words. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He raised both hands, palms out, placating. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t important, Veda. I need your help.”

“You need what?”

“A place to stay for a couple of hours,” Gabriel said. “A phone we can use. Some water. That’s all. I promise, it won’t happen again, but I do need your help now.”

One of her hands curled into a fist against the door. “And we both know what your promises are worth.”

“You know that’s not fair,” Gabriel said. “I thought you were dead, Veda. I saw the plane blow up—”

“Oh, and remind me, which ancient culture’s mourning rituals involve sleeping with the deceased’s sister?”

Joyce and Daniel both looked at him. Joyce especially.

“And who are you, sweetheart?” Veda said, turning to Joyce. “His latest?” She looked Joyce up and down, like she was measuring her for a coffin. “Well, Gabriel, I guess you are maturing. At least this one’s not eighteen. Are you, honey?”

“Excuse me,” Joyce said, her eyes sparking every bit as much as Veda’s. “We just barely escaped being shot at and blown up and chased off a hotel roof, we climbed down thirty stories and stole a car, and all this is after we very nearly got buried alive twice—and I spent five days hanging in a goddamn cage—and we’re asking you for what, a lousy glass of water and a place to sit down? Lady, maybe he did screw your sister, but right this moment I honestly don’t give a damn!”

“Well, now,” Veda said. “Little spitfire, aren’t you? I’d watch out for this one, Gabriel. She might actually use the cleaver when the time comes.”

“The time won’t come,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry it ever did with you. Honestly, Veda, I never meant to hurt you.”

Veda blew a raspberry. “No, you just meant to deflower my sister. You know the worst part? She still talks about you. Says she never had another man who could measure up to you.”

Daniel and Joyce looked at him again. Especially Joyce.

“Do you think, maybe,” Gabriel said, in a small voice, “we could have this conversation inside? And maybe also in private? No reason Joyce and Daniel need to hear this. They’re tired—”

“I’m not too tired,” Joyce said. “And I’m finding this fascinating.”

“Well, take notes, love, because with this one you can’t be too careful.”

“Veda,” Gabriel said, “you’ve got the wrong impression, we’re not involved—”

“Shush, you,” Veda said, and turned back to Joyce. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Joyce told her. “And that’s your father?”

“My uncle,” Joyce said.

“Your uncle. I’m sure you have a good reason for carting him around while people shoot at you. Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me and tell me all about it…”

Veda took Joyce by the elbow and led her off, leaving the front door open. It was as much of an invitation as he was going to get, Gabriel thought. And maybe more than he deserved.

“You really slept with her sister?” Daniel whispered as they stepped inside.

“Daniel,” Gabriel said, “I’d think twice before lecturing anyone else on the subject of betrayal.”

Sitting on the couch, Joyce held the Star of Arnuwanda and read off the Nesili symbols along the outer rim: spire, cattle, tilled field, ash, offering, manure, dune, killing, dread, tar pit, and on and on, dozens of them, like some sort of glossary of the Hittite world. Daniel, sitting beside her and holding a bag of ice on his swollen knee, periodically corrected her translations.

Veda came into the living room. “So that’s the Star you were telling me about?”

“The Star of Arnuwanda, that’s right,” Joyce said. “It’ll tell us where the third Eye of Teshub is hidden—but only if we can figure out what the third element is.”

“You mean element like hydrogen and helium and uranium?”

“More like earth, air, fire, and water,” Daniel said. “This was a very long time ago. And the Hittites made it even simpler: They divided their world into just three fundamental substances, earth, water, and something else, but no one knows what that third one actually was.”

“Why not?”

“Because the only tablet on which it was carved that survived the destruction of their civilization was lost nearly a hundred years ago and all we’ve got are translations that aren’t very clear. We don’t know which symbol the translator had in mind when he wrote about the third element. ‘Loose soil’—there are any number of symbols that could correspond to, especially when some symbols have multiple meanings. Tilled field, for instance, also meant ‘fertile land’—and fertile soil might be described as ‘loose.’ Or manure, as in ‘night soil.’ Even cattle, which is sometimes translated as ‘breakers of the soil.’”

“Or ash,” Veda said.

“I suppose,” Daniel said, thinking it over. “Ash is certainly loose, and that would at least push in the direction of ‘fire,’ which would be in keeping with the Greek model…”

“The problem is, there are too many possibilities,” Joyce said. “We need some way to narrow them down.”

“Well, there’s the map,” Daniel said. “It only covers the eastern hemisphere, so obviously that means all three gemstones were somewhere on these four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia.”

“It could be underwater, like the last one,” Gabriel pointed out. “The map also includes the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea…”

“No,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Only one of the elements was water. The other two were definitely solids. Earth and…” He trailed off.

“That’s the question,” Joyce said. “Earth, water and what?”

“Maybe we’re approaching this from the wrong angle,” Gabriel said. “Rather than focusing on what the element is, maybe we should be thinking about what we know about the Eyes and how the Hittites hid them.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel said.

“I don’t know yet,” Gabriel said. “But we’ve seen two of the three hiding places—maybe there’s something there that will help us find the third.”

Daniel shifted on the couch, adjusting the bag of ice. “All right, let’s think it through. What have you seen in the crypts other than the jewels themselves?”

Joyce chewed her lip, thinking back to the underwater crypt in the Mediterranean and the one in Borneo. “They both had corpses stationed as guardians, men in armor who had been buried alive.”

“That’s generally what you find with the Hittites,” Daniel said. “Other cultures, too, for that matter—the Chinese at the Great Wall, even the British used to entomb workers in the foundation when they put up a bridge.”

“You’re kidding,” Veda said.

“No, no, it’s quite true,” Daniel said. “You know that verse of the song ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ that goes ‘Set a man to watch all night, watch all night, watch all night’? That’s a reference to burying a man in the bridge foundation, as a sort of guardian.”

“Learn something new every day,” Veda said.

“Come on, what else do we know?” Gabriel said.

Joyce’s eyes slid shut. “There were altars in both, with the jewels held in carved stone hands. The hands had hinged fingers that bent inward when the jewels were removed. In each case there was a panel overhead, a trap, that was released when the fingers moved. There was the light from the jewels, flickering on the walls…”

She opened her eyes. “The inscription,” she said.

Daniel looked at her. “What inscription?”

“There were the same words written on the wall,” Joyce said. “ ‘The light at world’s end.’ ”

Gabriel said, “Or possibly ‘The fire at world’s end.’ Your standard apocalyptic stuff—’the end of the world is coming,’ ‘the end is near,’ that sort of thing.”

Daniel pulled at his lower lip in concentration. “But Hittite mythology never had an apocalypse story like Ragnarok or Armageddon. They had no concept of the end of the world.”

“Hang on,” Veda said, “did it say ‘the end of the world’ or ‘world’s end’?”

“Why?” Joyce said. “Does it make a difference?”

“Look, I’m no archaeologist,” Veda said, “I’m just a linguist—but speaking as a linguist I’d say yes, word order does matter.” She folded her arms over her chest. “If you say ‘the end of the world,’ you’re generally referring to a time—the ‘end of days’ if you’re an evangelical Christian, Ragnarok for the Norse, and so forth. But ‘world’s end’ sounds more like a place to me—you know, the edge of the earth, the place past which you cannot venture, ‘here there be monsters,’ all that.”

Daniel snapped his fingers. “Of course! The Bushmen!”

“In Africa?” Gabriel said.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s got to be. The Bushmen—or the San, as they’re properly known—have lived in Africa for some twenty thousand years, since before the Ice Age, in fact. But in part due to the Ice Age, the San never left their territory to explore or become an empire the way so many other ancient cultures did. They stayed in one place and didn’t have any contact with other societies for thousands of years. Throughout that time, they believed there was nothing else out there, that they were alone in the world.” He tapped a finger on the landmass of Africa on the map. “There was a remote area at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in what’s now Botswana, where the ancient San wouldn’t go. They believed it was the boundary of all existence, occupied by spirits and demons. They called it…well, in their language you might translate it as ‘world’s end.’ ”

Gabriel shook his head. It was all so obvious. These things always were, once you figured them out. “Here, let me have the Star.”

“But we still don’t know what the element is,” Joyce said.

“Yes, we do,” Gabriel said, taking the ancient device from her and switching on his flashlight. Daniel limped over to the wall to draw the curtains. “The Kalahari Desert. It’s not loose soil. It’s sand.”

Gabriel turned the starburst at the center of the Star to the symbol for dune and, holding the flashlight above it, positioned the Star so the projected symbol lined up with its counterpart on the map below. The light shone through the small red jewel this time, casting a thin, scarlet beam of light.

It struck southern Africa, exactly where Daniel had been pointing.

“World’s End,” he said.

Chapter 19

Edgar Grissom pulled the truck to a stop by the side of the road. They were in the hills outside Antalya, nothing but trees and a narrow road extending into the distance. In the passenger seat, DeVoe, his electronics expert, held a small satellite-linked tracking device, the flashing light on the screen accompanied by a loud beeping that had grown faster and more insistent in the past few minutes. Grissom killed the engine and stepped out onto the road. The back door opened and three men climbed out, their handguns drawn. DeVoe came up beside Grissom, studying the device in his hand. His wide, angular face was pockmarked with acne scars. A black eyepatch covered his right eye.

“You’re sure they’re here?” Grissom asked.

“This way,” DeVoe said, pointing toward the forest beside the road.

Grissom let him lead the way. Just a few feet into the woods, the device’s beeping grew so rapid that it turned into a single high-pitched electronic trill. His men lifted their guns in preparation, but there was no one there. Just trees, shrubs and dirt.

“Sir,” DeVoe said. He pointed at the ground.

Lying on a bed of dead leaves was Daniel Wingard’s cell phone. Grissom stooped and picked it up. Its screen was cracked and the phone’s casing was scraped and dirty. He hurled the phone against a tree, where it smashed into bits of metal and plastic. The beeping from the tracking device stopped abruptly.

Grissom whirled on DeVoe like a snarling animal. “Find them. Do you understand me? I don’t care how you do it, I don’t care who you have to pay off or kill, but you are going to find them. I want to see the passenger manifests of every plane, train, bus and boat out of Turkey! If they’re riding goddamn donkeys across the border, I want to know about it!” He jabbed a finger into DeVoe’s chest. “You do that for me, DeVoe, or I’ll have your other eye. Do we understand each other?”

DeVoe’s reply was quiet, but immediate. “Yes, sir.”

Grissom stormed back to the van.

Gabriel Hunt would not escape again. He wouldn’t allow it.

Joyce sat in the living room only half watching CNN on Veda’s television. Daniel had been the one to turn it on, eager for some news of the outside world, but he’d fallen asleep on the couch shortly after.

Gabriel came in, Veda’s cordless phone in his hand. He replaced it in its cradle by the couch. “Michael’s gotten us passage on a ship to Madagascar leaving tomorrow,” he said quietly. “From there it’s a short flight to Botswana.”

“Why not just fly directly?” Joyce asked.

“Lower profile this way,” he said. “Slightly, anyway. He was able to book it under his name rather than ours.” He looked over at Daniel, who was stirring in his sleep.

“Don’t look at him like that,” Joyce said. “You know he was just trying to protect me.”

“I do know that,” Gabriel said. “I believe it. But it was a terrible decision. He nearly got you killed. And me.”

“And himself,” Joyce said. “I think he’s learned his lesson.”

“Maybe.”

“I wish you’d give him another chance.”

“We’ll see,” Gabriel said.

Vassily Platonov stood in Arkady’s apartment in Samarinda, on the eastern coast of Borneo. It felt strange to be wearing street clothes—dirty, heretical—but in order to get to Arkady’s apartment he’d had to blend in as best he could, and wearing his ceremonial tunic and headdress would have been a poor way to do that.

The meeting had to be here because this was where Arkady’s computer was, and Arkady had insisted that using the computer was the only way to track the movements of their prey. Vassily was skeptical, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. This was the modern world, and one had to accommodate oneself to its devices. For now. Until Ulikummis returned and melted every computer and every cellular telephone and every other modern instrument into so much slag.

But for now, the computer.

He watched Arkady press tiny buttons on the device.

“Look at this, High Priest.” He pointed at a line of characters on the device’s screen. HUNT, MICHAEL it said. 3 BERTHS, AFRICAN PRINCESS, SAILING 10AM.

“This Michael Hunt,” Vassily said, “he is the American?”

“No, High Priest,” Arkady said. “Our man at the airport says the American’s name is Gabriel Hunt. This Michael Hunt is his brother.”

“And you think if we seize his brother…?”

“No, High Priest. I believe he has had his brother make arrangements for him to travel, along with the woman and another—presumably the Japanese who killed Dmitri and Nikolas. He is trying to hide his movements, but he cannot hide from us.”

“From the wrath of Ulikummis, you mean,” Vassily said.

“Yes, of course, High Priest.”

“And this ship they will be on, it goes from where to where?”

“From Turkey to Madagascar, High Priest.”

“Madagascar,” Vassily said. “We do not have any brethren there.”

“No, High Priest,” Arkady replied. “But we do have brothers throughout Africa we can mobilize.”

“Contact them. Tell them we are coming.”

“Yes, High Priest,” Arkady said.

The setting sun shed a rippling orange band of light across the waters of the Mediterranean. Gabriel sat alone on the dock behind Veda’s house, letting the waves gently rock him while he dangled his bare feet in the warm water. Years had passed since he’d last sat in that spot. In the distance, past the sailboats and trawlers that dotted the sea, he could make out the blocky, turreted Fortress of Mamure winding along the shoreline. It was an impressive structure, considering its construction had been started by the Romans in the third century and finished some eight hundred years later by Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubat I. In the catacombs beneath the fortress, he and Veda had found secret storerooms filled with treasures hoarded by the Sultan, including a set of ornate chess pieces, one side made of solid gold, the other of platinum. A Japanese billionaire who called himself Hachiman had sent a hired team of former yakuza to steal it all, and they’d very nearly succeeded. But Hachiman was now serving a life sentence in a prison in Osaka, and the Sultan’s treasure had been divided among several Turkish museums and universities. A happy ending. He wished there were more of them in the world. Something told him things wouldn’t end quite so neatly this time. Hachiman seemed like a model of sanity and pacifism compared to Edgar Grissom.

He heard the back door of Veda’s house open and close, but didn’t turn from the view until Joyce sat down next to him. She kicked off her shoes and let her feet touch the water beside his.

“Are you sure you want to come? You know you don’t have to, right?”

“I don’t think Veda would let me stay here,” Gabriel said.

“You know what I mean. You could fly home from Madagascar. You’ve done everything Michael asked you to. You don’t have to keep helping me.”

“And who would watch your back in the desert—Daniel? Even if he deserves the second chance you’re so keen on giving him, he can’t protect you the way…”

Joyce smiled. “The way you can?”

“The way you need,” Gabriel said.

She watched the sunset with him for a while. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“All this treasure hunting you do, all this exploring…it’s like you can’t sit still, you’re never happy where you are. It’s like you’re always looking for something, but you never find it.”

“And your question is…?”

“What are you really looking for, Gabriel?”

He watched the water lap against the side of the floating dock. He thought of the hospital in Gibraltar, the authorities telling him they had no idea what had happened to the ship his parents were on during the three days it had apparently vanished from the Mediterranean Sea.

“People think it’s all been found,” Gabriel said, “that we live in a world that has no secrets anymore. The modern world, with every inch catalogued and mapped and photographed and recorded. They don’t know how wrong they are. There are still things in the world that no one’s seen in thousands of years or that no one’s ever seen, things no one can explain. Things that could have an enormous impact on people’s lives, for good or bad. Someone’s got to find them. And preferably not men like Grissom.”

Joyce nodded.

“You know,” Gabriel said, “your uncle wanted me to try to talk you out of pursuing a life like mine. He’d like to see you in a safe, comfortable university position, not running around in a jungle getting shot at.”

“He said that to you?” Joyce asked. Gabriel nodded. “Sorry, but my uncle doesn’t get to make my decisions for me. Neither do you.”

“Good,” Gabriel said. “Because you’re going to be great at this someday.” And he leaned over to kiss her.

Chapter 20

The cruise ship African Princess stretched six hundred feet from bow to stern, with three balconied levels rising above the main deck, all filled with restaurants, ballrooms, shops, two casinos, and luxury staterooms for nearly one thousand passengers. These luxury staterooms had all been booked months in advance; what Michael had managed to reserve was a pair of small cabins belowdecks where the white-noise hum of the engines was ever-present.

“Before this, I would’ve guessed you traveled everywhere first class,” Joyce said.

“Actually, I prefer not to,” Gabriel said. “Especially when I’m trying to stay out of sight.” He leaned against the closed connecting door between the cabin he and Joyce were sharing and the one they’d put Daniel in; Gabriel had told him he was confined to quarters for the duration, and he’d accepted this without complaint. He’d seemed to be glad for a way to do penance.

Gabriel watched through the porthole as they made slow progress through the rolling whitecaps. The sun dipped low in the sky, silhouetting the African coastline in the distance. They’d been sailing for two days. Madagascar wouldn’t be far now, he thought. And from there, Botswana.

Behind him, Joyce gathered the rumpled sheets around her on the bunk and propped herself up on one elbow. “You look a thousand miles away.”

“Just thinking about what we’re going to find when we get to the desert,” Gabriel said. “We’ve been chasing after the gemstones so much we haven’t even thought about the Spearhead itself. What it is, what it looks like. How we’ll recognize it. We don’t even know where it is.”

“I doubt Grissom knows either,” Joyce said. “That’s something, at least.”

“It is,” Gabriel said, “but it’s not enough.”

“He also doesn’t know the third Eye is at World’s End.”

“We hope,” Gabriel said. “He found ways to follow us the first two times.”

“Well, even if he has again—hell, even if he’s somehow figured it out for himself and gotten there first—we still have one of the Eyes ourselves. He can’t do anything without it, right?”

Gabriel turned to look out the window again. Could the Spearhead be activated or used with only two of the three Eyes? It seemed unlikely. But if Grissom did find his way to the last Eye before them, all he’d have to do would be wait for them to show up carrying the one they had. They could be walking into an ambush.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it from aboard this ship,” Joyce said. “We may as well enjoy ourselves while we’re here.”

“Low profile, remember?”

“I’m not talking about dancing naked on deck,” Joyce said, “I’m thinking we could have a nice dinner. The three of us.”

“Daniel’s under house arrest,” Gabriel said. “No leaving his cabin.” They’d been bringing him three meals a day and paperbacks from the ship’s convenience store to keep him occupied. He’d asked for nothing more.

“We can let him out for just one night, can’t we?” Joyce asked. “Hasn’t he been punished enough?”

“This isn’t about punishment,” Gabriel said. “This is about keeping us safe. He almost got us killed, for heaven’s sake.”

She nodded. “I know, but he hasn’t tried to contact Grissom again, right?”

“He hasn’t had the opportunity.”

“That’s not true, he could have done it anytime at Veda’s house. She had a phone in every room, and a computer too, but he didn’t.”

“Because one of us was with him at all times,” Gabriel said.

“Maybe that’s why,” Joyce said, “but I think he wouldn’t have anyway.” Gabriel looked unconvinced. “Besides, we won’t be able to keep him locked up when we get to wherever we’re going. We’re going to have to take a chance on him again at some point. We may as well start now.”

Gabriel sighed. “If anything happens, if he tries to get away…”

“We’re on a boat. Where’s he going to go?” She climbed off the bed and started picking through the pile of clothing on the floor, no doubt looking for something appropriate to wear among all her field gear. Good luck finding a cocktail dress in there, Gabriel thought. But it was just as well, since he only had the one outfit himself—and, just to be safe, he’d be accessorizing it his usual way, with a leather jacket just long enough to conceal his hip holster.

Under cover of night, the thirty-foot ketch cut smoothly and quietly through the waters of the Indian Ocean. They’d taken down the sails so they wouldn’t be seen by the African Princess, instead propelling themselves forward with a small, muffled motor attached to the stern. At Vassily’s command, the engine was cut, and they floated up silently, small as an insect next to the hulking cruise ship. An emergency hatch in the African Princess’s hull stood just above sea level. They tied mooring ropes to the thick bolt beside the hatch, securing the ketch in place in the shadow of the ship.

The brethren of the Cult of Ulikummis—more than a dozen men in all—stood at the ready, awaiting Vassily’s orders. Arkady stood with the others in their robes and skull masks, in some cases with bows slung over one shoulder, quivers over the other, in all cases with swords through their belts. Tonight Vassily would let them spill all the blood they wanted.

Arkady reached out and pressed a square of explosives firmly against the seam of the hatch, then inserted a fuse. It took three attempts in the damp night air to get a match lit, but once he had, it took no time at all to set the fuse burning. Hastily, all the men dropped to the bottom of the ketch. The explosion, when it came, was quiet, as explosions went. Looking up, they saw that the blast had knocked the hatch off its hinges and onto the floor inside. One by one they climbed in through the opening, Vassily going last.

They found themselves in a hot, dimly lit, graywalled hallway that ran past the engine room. A loud mechanical hum filled the corridor. At the far end, a staircase led up to the passenger decks. As they moved forward, the door of the engine room opened and two men rushed out, summoned by the noise of the explosion—it hadn’t been quiet enough for no one to notice—or else the hull breach had set off some automatic monitor. Upon seeing the heavily armed cult members, the men skidded to a halt, their eyes wide with surprise.

“What the hell—” the first one sputtered. Before he’d even finished his sentence, one of the cult members had pulled the sword from his belt and slashed it mercilessly across his throat.

Vassily spun his staff and thrust its bronze blade into the second man’s neck, pinning him to the wall. He made wet choking sounds as blood flowed down his shirt, and he clawed at his throat. When his grasping hands slackened and dropped to his sides, Vassily pulled the blade out. The second man’s corpse fell on top of the first.

They continued silently toward the stairs.

“I appreciate this, Gabriel,” Daniel Wingard said. The plate before him was empty except for a few decapitated asparagus stalks. “I hope this means we’ve come to some kind of détente.”

“That depends entirely on you,” Gabriel replied.

They were dining on the upper deck of the ship, the cloudless sky above them filled with bright stars and a waning gibbous moon. The open-air restaurant was called the Safari Club. It was separated from the rest of the deck by latticed wooden walls, each decorated with spears, leopard-skin shields and large mural paintings of the African savannah and its wildlife. The waiter cleared their dishes and disappeared inside the serving station housed in a small square “hut” with a straw-thatched roof. The cruise line had spared no expense on the décor, but Gabriel couldn’t help the disdain he felt for this sort of tourist’s-eye rendition of Africa. Whoever designed it had obviously never set foot in the real savannah, he’d just watched old Tarzan pictures or ridden the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland.

“That’s certainly fair,” Daniel said, sipping at his water. “So why don’t I do something to make myself useful? I’ve had a lot of time to think, cooped up in that cabin, and something dawned on me that I don’t recall any of us bringing up before.”

“What’s that?” Gabriel said.

“I’ve seen dozens of images of Teshub over the years, drawings and paintings and sculptures, I’ve probably read hundreds of descriptions, and every one of them is pretty much the same—oh, details vary from one to the next, but he’s always portrayed as looking like a man, with ordinary human features. Nowhere is there any suggestion that Teshub has three eyes, like Shiva or Mahadeva. Teshub is always shown as having the ordinary number of eyes.”

Daniel looked up from his plate and met Gabriel’s gaze across the table.

“You see what I’m getting at?” Daniel continued. “We’re looking for the three Eyes of Teshub. The number three keeps showing up in the legend—three elements, the three armies that will determine the Spearhead’s fate, even the three blades on the Death’s Head Key. But why three eyes when he’s always shown as only having two?”

“Could it be another mistranslation?” Gabriel asked. “Maybe the word that’s been translated as ‘eye’ also means something else…?”

Daniel shook his head. “Unlikely. The Nesili symbol for ‘eye’ isn’t one that has multiple meanings, and the one meaning it does have is amply documented.”

Gabriel took one last sip of wine, emptying his glass. More riddles. That was how Daniel chose to make himself useful? If he wanted to be useful, he’d supply some answers, not more questions.

He watched a waiter walk out of the restaurant and onto the deck with a tray of drinks, disappearing past the serving station. When he came back, maybe Gabriel would ask him for a refill…

The sudden noise of shattering glass made Gabriel spring to his feet.

He saw the crowd of white-robed cultists flooding onto the deck. “Get down!”

Joyce and Daniel threw themselves to the floor. Gabriel pulled his Colt from its holster. The other passengers in the restaurant screamed and backed away from their tables.

Three cult members nocked arrows into their bows on the run.

Gabriel kicked the table onto its side, sending their wineglasses, the empty bottle and the floral centerpiece smashing to the floor, then ducked behind it with Joyce and Daniel. The hiss of multiple arrows cut the air, and the table jolted and thumped as they struck it.

“I thought we’d seen the last of them,” Joyce said.

“They must have followed us from Borneo.”

“Is this the Cult of Ulikummis?” Daniel asked. His eyebrows lifted and he peeked around the side of the table. “Fascinating! Look at those masks! Twelfth century B.C. design, I’d say.”

“Very helpful, Professor,” Gabriel said, pulling him back behind the table. More arrows flew past, embedding in the polished wooden floor around them. “But you’re not watching a slide show in a lecture hall. Stay down.”

He didn’t take his own advice. He leapt up instead, firing the Colt. His first shot struck one of the archers and sent him spinning over the deck railing. His second and third, carefully placed, took down the other two. The remaining cult members rushed forward with their swords drawn.

“Get him out of here,” Gabriel shouted to Joyce. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”

“We can’t leave,” Joyce shouted back.

“Don’t be a hero, Joyce, just go,” Gabriel said, but glancing back he saw she wasn’t being a hero, she was just describing the situation. The rear wall of the restaurant blocked their escape. They were penned in.

Chapter 21

Gabriel got to his feet fast and, ducking under the swinging sword of the cult member closest to him, rushed to a side wall of the restaurant where one of the pairs of spears was held crossed in a metal bracket. He wrenched them out of their mounting and threw one to Joyce. She caught it in both hands and swung it like a staff to parry another swordsman’s attack. Daniel, meanwhile, had grabbed one of the leopard-skin shields off the wall and was hiding behind it while another cultist battered it with his blade.

Gabriel’s attention was swiftly brought back to his own situation when the attacker whose last blow he’d ducked came back for a second try. Gabriel made as if to duck it again, but then stepped back and plunged the spear downward, like a primitive fisherman spearing a catch in a stream. The catch in this case being the cult member’s foot. The man howled in pain as the blade plunged through his boot, pinning him to the deck, and Gabriel breathed a silent thanks to the decorator whose taste he’d been mentally condemning earlier. It was still poor taste—but at least the man had gone as far as investing in real spears, not plastic or cast-resin fakes.

The swordsman sank to one knee, both hands going to the shaft of the spear in order to pull it out, and Gabriel snatched up the man’s sword as it fell to the deck. Spinning when he heard racing footsteps behind him, Gabriel swept it upward to meet the descending blade of one of the speared man’s compatriots. The blades struck in midair with a clang of metal against metal. Gabriel brought his down and under for a riposte that caught the other man across his unprotected wrist. A spray of blood jetted out.

But more of them kept coming. Good god, how many were there?

Gabriel fired his Colt twice more and he saw two more men fall. But he’d be out of bullets before they’d be out of men. He looked around desperately. Where could he get away from them…?

The hut. There had to be an exit there, leading to a belowdecks galley if nothing else. He ran for it, hooking a chair with one foot as he sprinted and kicking it backward into the knees of the man closest behind him. The man went over in a tangle of robes.

Gabriel plunged into the hut—and found his way blocked by a figure he had hoped never to see again. The high priest of the Cult of Ulikummis, wearing his red and gold tunic and tall, rectangular headdress, whirled the bronze-bladed staff in his hands. Gabriel fell back as the blade sliced past his face. He blocked the next blow with his sword, though just barely—the man was attacking fiercely and with more strength than Gabriel found himself able to muster. And probably without a glass of Montepulciano in him, either.

Gabriel raised his gun and fired—only to hear the hammer land on an empty chamber. He saw a vicious smile blossom on the high priest’s face at the sound.

Holstering his gun, Gabriel swung the sword in his other hand in a huge arc, not expecting to hit the high priest, just buying himself room to back out of the hut. The high priest shrank back, then came after him as he retreated.

Out in the open again, Gabriel shot a glance over at Joyce. She and Daniel were surrounded by the remaining cultists. Joyce had pulled a second shield off the wall and together with Daniel had formed an approximation of a phalanx, shield to shield, as a barrier against the swords crashing down on them.

The high priest advanced on Gabriel once more.

A loud crack followed by a clatter of wooden boards drew both men’s attention. Joyce, apparently having decided they were hopelessly outnumbered, had kicked a hole in the latticed wooden wall at the back of the restaurant and she and Daniel were backing out through it, still blocking incoming blows with their shields. The shields were too large to fit through the hole, but they were perfect for covering it, and Joyce wedged them into place in front of the hole as they made their escape along the deck behind it.

But the shields didn’t hold the swordsmen for long. One of them kicked them out of the way and plunged through the hole in pursuit while two others retrieved the bows and half-full quivers from their fallen comrades and let fly with new shots that carried over the lattice wall in deadly arcs.

Gabriel and the high priest watched all this in the handful of instants it took and then looked back at each other. “It’s just you and me now,” Gabriel said. The high priest howled in rage and swung his staff at Gabriel’s head.

Gabriel watched the point race toward him through the air. Timing his movement carefully—carefully!—he grabbed at the shaft as it neared, managing to get a grip just below the blade. He pivoted swiftly, drawing the high priest along with the staff. But the man was too savvy to be caught by the same trick twice. He let go of the staff before Gabriel could use it to drag him to the edge of the deck and over the railing. Gabriel had expected this. He punched backward with the butt end of the staff, knocking the man’s wind out of him with a firm blow to the belly. The high priest dropped to his knees gasping.

It was tempting to finish him off. But some distance away Gabriel heard Joyce shouting as she continued fighting off the attackers. She needed help—that had to come first. Gabriel ran toward the hole in the lattice wall, crawled through, and then took stock of the scene before him. Some fifty feet away, Joyce and Daniel were huddled behind a couple of upended lounge chairs and the bowmen, who had somehow gotten to the other side of them, were letting fly with arrows. Gabriel lifted the high priest’s staff like a javelin and heaved it in the direction of the larger of the two bowmen. The man didn’t spot it sailing toward him until the instant before it buried itself in his chest. But as soon as he fell, one of the remaining swordsmen ran to take up his bow.

At that moment, the aft stairwell door burst open, and three of the ship’s security guards ran out onto the deck, their guns drawn, shouting for everyone to freeze. The new bowman turned and reached for an arrow. The guards yelled at the cult members to drop their weapons. A pair of arrows shrieked through the air, piercing the torso of one guard and the neck of another. The third dropped to one knee and opened fire. Two white-robed men fell, and the others—few in number at last—pulled back. But one aimed and fired an arrow, and it found its mark. The third guard joined the first two in death.

In the distance, Gabriel saw Joyce and Daniel duck down behind the lounge chairs again. Gabriel sprinted across the deck toward them, the Death’s Head Key bouncing heavily against his chest under his shirt. An arrow zipped past him, striking the wall behind the sundeck. He darted over, dodging with one arm up to protect his head, and dropped to the ground beside Joyce. He glanced over the top of the lounge chair. The high priest was on his feet again and striding toward the three remaining cult members, two of whom were loading their bows with fresh arrows. He had his staff in hand once more, its blade red with the blood of the man from whose chest he’d drawn it.

“Something you need to know,” Gabriel said. “I’m out of bullets.”

“I figured,” Joyce said, “from how little shooting you were doing.”

The door leading to the stairwell was only forty feet behind them. Gabriel nodded toward it. “Think you can make it?” he whispered.

“I think I can,” Joyce said. “I’m just not sure about Daniel.”

“I’ll try,” Daniel said.

They spun and ran for the door. Gabriel heard the twang of bowstrings, arrows cutting the air toward them. Gabriel pushed himself hard. They were almost there. Another bowstring twanged.

“Gabriel, look out!” Daniel yelled. He rammed into Gabriel from behind, knocking him to one side. The arrow that had been headed squarely at Gabriel’s back stabbed into Daniel’s shoulder instead. His face instantly went pale. “I’m hit,” he said softly and fell to the deck.

Joyce, almost at the door, skidded to a halt. She ran back.

Gabriel looked around for some way to draw the cult members’ attention away from them. His gaze fell on the bodies of the security guards slumped by the wall. Their guns lay on the floor beside them. Gabriel ran for them. As he’d hoped, the bowmen turned to follow him, taking their aim off Joyce and Daniel. Arrows pursued him across the deck. One slashed his back, slicing his shirt and drawing a hot line of pain across his shoulder blades, but he kept moving. He dropped to the deck and slid across it like he was sliding into home plate. As he fetched up against the dead guards’ bodies, he grabbed one of their guns in each hand. Turning back, he squeezed the triggers repeatedly, blasting bullet after bullet at the cultists. White robes burst into red, skull masks cracked and shattered, bows dropped from their hands. When the smoke cleared, only the high priest was left standing—and he broke and made a run for it.

Gabriel fired at him but the man was already too far and the shot went wide. Gabriel considered giving chase—but Daniel needed help. He ran over to Joyce instead.

“Don’t worry about us,” she shouted. “Get that bastard!”

At the far end of the deck, Gabriel saw the high priest spiraling down a metal staircase between decks. Gabriel grabbed the railing at the edge of the top deck and jumped over it, dropping twenty feet to the deck below. He landed on his feet, rolled off the impact, then sprang up and sprinted for the stairwell. The high priest was already on the next level down. Gabriel chased him down two more flights before the high priest burst through the door to the main deck. Gabriel followed a moment later, only to find the deck empty. He looked both ways, saw the door to the ballroom swinging shut, and ran for it. He grabbed it just before it closed and slipped inside.

The enormous room was dark except for flickering pinpoints of light thrown along the walls by the mirrored ball rotating on the ceiling. The stage, the dance floor and the small tables surrounding it were all empty. Everyone must have been sent back to their rooms after word spread of the attack. He looked around, but there was no sign of the high priest. Gabriel stepped deeper into the ballroom, chilled equally by the strong air-conditioning and the utter silence. The high priest could be anywhere. He could be directly behind Gabriel, getting ready to launch an attack…

Movement caught his eye, the flutter of a dark curtain draped over the wall. Gabriel ran toward it, threw back the curtain. No one was there, only an emergency exit. He hit the panic bar and shoved the door open. Beyond it was a long hallway that extended to either side. He ran down both directions to the end before finally admitting to himself that he’d lost the man. The high priest was probably off the ship by now.

He returned to the stairwell and encountered Joyce helping Daniel down the stairs.

“What happened?” Joyce asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “He got away.” Daniel was still pale and had a gloss of sweat on his forehead, but the arrow was gone from his shoulder, replaced with a wide circle of blood on his shirt. “How’s he doing?”

“I’m okay,” Daniel said, though his unsteady voice suggested otherwise. “The arrow didn’t go in very deep…Joyce was able to pull it out.”

“Arrows like this hurt like hell coming out,” Gabriel said. “I know from experience.”

“Yes, hell’s a fair approximation,” Daniel said, wincing, “of what it feels like to have a…a sharp piece of metal torn out of your flesh.”

Gabriel took the bulk of Daniel’s weight off Joyce’s shoulder and helped him down the rest of the stairs and out into the hallway that led to their cabins. “It was a foolish thing to do, jumping in front of an arrow like that.”

“Trust me, I have no intention of ever doing it again,” Daniel said.

“But it probably did save my life,” Gabriel said. “I owe you one.”

“How about you pay me back by declaring house arrest over?” Daniel said.

Gabriel exchanged a glance with Joyce.

“Done,” Gabriel said. “But let’s make one more stop in your cabin. There’s a first aid kit in the bathroom. I know a thing or two about treating arrow wounds.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Daniel shook his head. “I can’t believe I actually got shot with an arrow. By a millennia-old death cult!”

“That’ll pack them in at your next lecture,” Joyce said.

Daniel looked up at Gabriel. “Is it always like this for you?”

“No,” he said. “Sometimes the death cults are only centuries-old.”

They turned the corner and Gabriel froze as they saw the cabin doors. The door to Daniel’s cabin was shut tight, but the door to his and Joyce’s was slightly ajar, its edge chipped and bent near the lock. He handed Daniel back off to Joyce and whispered, “Stay here.”

He pushed the door open slowly, switched on the light. The room had been tossed: the closet door was open, the drawers pulled out of the dresser, the sheets stripped from the bed. He saw Joyce’s backpack lying open on the floor. He picked it up and looked inside.

“Damn it!”

“What’s wrong?” Joyce asked, from the doorway.

“They’re gone,” Gabriel said, waving the empty backpack at her. “The Star, the map, the Eye, all of it.” He’d been a fool. The attack had been a diversion. The cult’s true objectives had been sitting unguarded in his cabin all along.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Daniel said. “That’s not good at all.”

Vassily watched as Arkady undid the ropes mooring their boat to the African Princess. The young man had done well, locating the interlopers’ room and then stealing the sacred relics. But the two of them were the only ones who remained out of an attack force of more than a dozen. And if Arkady had been with them on deck, he would surely be as dead as the others. The interlopers, this Gabriel Hunt and the other two (Who was that fat old man? Vassily wondered), had fought more bravely—and more effectively—than Vassily had anticipated. He’d expected to return not only with the Star and one of the Eyes of Teshub, but also with their heads for proud display and subsequent flensing and use in worship. That they were still alive vexed him. Ulikummis would not be happy with him for letting them live.

Arkady started the engine, moving the ketch forward along the length of the cruise ship.

“When we reach shore, you must contact the African sect, Arkady,” Vassily ordered. “Tell them we need more warriors.”

“Yes, High Priest. How many will you require?”

“All of them,” Vassily said.

Chapter 22

The jeep’s tires kicked up clouds of dust as it rattled and bumped over the uneven terrain of the desert. To make better time, Gabriel avoided the salt flats and the more verdant areas of the Kalahari, not wanting to be slowed down by traffic, safari tours or any of the native San villages. Massive, spiderlike baobab trees rose up every few hundred yards like sentinels amid the ocean of sand. The dry brush that poked out of the dunes scratched at the underside of the jeep as they raced over it while dust-colored meerkats poked their heads curiously out of their burrows to watch them pass. In the seat next to him, Joyce was buckled in, but only loosely so she could twist around to face Daniel in back. They were reviewing the only information they had left: the notes and coordinates he’d written down back in Veda’s house when they’d identified the location of the third Eye. As the jeep bounded over a low dune, the equipment in the back clattered.

The flight from Madagascar to Botswana had been quick and, compared to the events on the African Princess, painless. They’d managed to duck into a cab at the pier and go straight to the airport, evading the local police who wanted to keep all the passengers for questioning about the cult’s attack. A few hours later, their plane had touched down at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gabarone. They’d rented the jeep at the airport counter after the clerk had assured them it could handle off-road driving in the desert, though nearly bouncing out of the driver’s seat each time they raced over a dune, Gabriel wasn’t so sure they hadn’t been sold a bill of goods. They’d also purchased a wide range of equipment from a local store that clearly catered mainly to hobbyists on holiday who liked to go digging in the desert. The salesman had been surprised to hear fluent Tswana coming from an American and, when Gabriel explained their bona fides, had shown them to the section of the store for professionals. Daniel and Joyce had picked out a haul that included shovels, a pickaxe, a pair of metal buckets, binoculars, lanterns, surveying tools, and more, while Gabriel had sought out a different aisle, the one where they sold bullets.

In the backseat of the jeep, Daniel consulted a pocket compass. “It shouldn’t be much farther now,” he shouted over the rattle of the vehicle. “Keep going straight.”

Gabriel swerved around a wide baobab tree, then righted their course. He called back to Daniel: “Just let me know when we’re—”

“Now!” Daniel shouted.

“Now?”

“Yes!”

Gabriel slammed on the brakes and swung the steering wheel hard around. A dust cloud surrounded the jeep for a moment, then settled. From his seat he saw only rolling dunes and small, brittle tufts of shrubbery. “Are you sure this is the place?” It looked utterly desolate, as empty and featureless as any of the landscape they’d been passing through for the better part of two hours.

“According to the map,” Daniel replied, “yes. It should be about three meters ahead of us.”

Gabriel opened the door and stepped out onto the sand. The afternoon sun beat down hard on his head and shoulders. Behind him, Daniel and Joyce got out of the jeep, shielded their eyes and looked around.

“I admit it doesn’t look very promising,” Daniel said.

“To be fair, the other sites didn’t look promising either,” Gabriel said.

Her brow beading with sweat from the oppressive heat, Joyce took off the shirt she wore over her tanktop and tossed it in the jeep. She circled to the rear, opened the hatchback and pulled out an armful of shovels. “I suppose it would’ve been too much to ask for the gemstone to be out in the open, just this once,” she said. She put the shovels down and went back for the pickaxe and buckets.

Daniel walked out across the flat expanse of sand, rubbing at the bandage on his injured shoulder. He read the compass every few feet and checked it against his notes. “Think of it,” he said. “I’ve studied the legend of the Three Eyes of Teshub for decades, as many others have. But unlike, say, El Dorado or Atlantis or any number of legends that aren’t true—”

“Don’t be so sure about El Dorado,” Gabriel muttered.

“What?” Daniel asked.

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I’m just thinking it’s remarkable that after studying this legend for so long I’ve held one of the actual Eyes of Teshub in my hands. They’re real. They’re not a fantasy or a made-up story or the invention of some bard drunk on kumis. And now we’re standing where the third and final Eye has rested for thousands of years. Buried by eons of wind and sand. It’s extraordinary.”

Gabriel shielded his eyes and looked up at the sun. They’d already lost half the day getting here. Grissom could be anywhere. If they were lucky, he hadn’t figured out the location of the third gemstone and was still tooling around Turkey looking for them. Unfortunately, that had never been Gabriel’s kind of luck.

“Did any of your studies suggest how far down it might be?” he asked. “We may not have a lot of time to dig.”

Daniel shrugged. “Who can say? There’s a small village of mastaba tombs in the shadow of the Pyramid of Cheops. They were buried in the desert for millennia before anyone found them. And do you know how far they had to dig? Just fifteen feet. In the desert, the wind is always changing and the sand is always shifting. What’s buried hundreds of feet down one year might be so near the surface the next that a mild sandstorm could unearth it. We just have to hope this is a good year.” He stopped walking and pointed at the sand at his feet. “Here.” He stuffed his notes in his pocket, grabbed the pickaxe and used it to draw an X in the sand. “This is where we start.”

The sun crawled across the desert sky as Gabriel and Joyce dug. Daniel, his shoulder still sore from the arrow wound, worked on maintaining the pit walls instead, using a shovel and bucket to move the sand away from the ditch so it wouldn’t slide back in and fill up again.

It was backbreaking work. Rivulets of sweat flowed along Gabriel’s back, chest, neck and forehead. They paused occasionally to swig from the gallon jugs of bottled water they’d picked up in town, then got back to work. All the while, the baking sun kept at them mercilessly. They’d dug ten feet down by the time the heat broke and the sun started to dip toward the horizon.

Gabriel grabbed a water bottle and lifted it to his parched lips. As he took a swallow and bent to replace the bottle on the ground, he felt the Death’s Head Key twitch where it lay against his chest. He looked down and saw it pressing against his shirt. Reaching into his collar for the leather strap around his neck, he pulled the key out and held it over the pit. Instead of hanging straight down it trembled at the end of the strap, hanging at a ten-degree angle. Joyce and Daniel stared at it. “We’re close,” he told them.

They resumed digging. The farther down they got, the more the Death’s Head Key strained against its strap. Up above them, Daniel rubbed his hands together, though whether it was with excitement or anxiety, Gabriel couldn’t say. Probably a bit of both—Gabriel was certainly feeling both himself.

Gabriel drove the edge of his shovel into the wall of sand before him, and it struck something hard. Something the metal blade of the shovel struck with a ringing clank.

“My God,” Daniel whispered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Let’s hope,” Gabriel said.

The sky was turning red with sunset by the time they cleared the sand away from a buried door. The door itself was made of metal, though it was set into a wall composed of blocks of sandstone. Like the others they’d seen, this door was covered with ornate carvings and had no handle, only the keyhole with its three slots and the small skull design carved above it. Gabriel took the key from around his neck and lined it up with the lock. This time he was prepared—but when the key jumped from his hand and pulled itself into the lock, he still found his heart beating faster. Gabriel threw his strength into turning the key. It seemed to take more effort than the first two, but it was hard to say—after all, he hadn’t been the one turning it the first time and they had been underwater the second. All he knew for sure was that the imprint of the skull would be pressed into the flesh of his palm for a good long time. But he kept straining until he heard the loud, metallic click he was waiting for. He felt the resistance give way as the internal mechanism kicked in and the door began creaking open. They stepped back to make way. Dry, fetid air blew out of the crypt, stirring the sands around them.

Daniel limped back to the jeep to get the flashlight. When he returned, he handed it down to Joyce. “This is your find, Joyce. It’s your name they’ll put on this before anyone else’s. It should be you who has the honor of being the first to set foot inside.”

Joyce took the flashlight from him and held onto his hand. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“I know, my dear. I know how much you wanted this. And I want you to know I’m sorry for—well, for everything, but especially for trying to stand in the way of your doing…this. I never should have treated you like you’re still a little girl who needs her foolish, overprotective uncle’s help.” He squeezed her hand. “But most of all, I want you to know how proud of you I am. I’m frightened for you—but I couldn’t be prouder.”

Gabriel raised his left hand in the air. The luminous digits on the dial of his wristwatch had begun to glow as the daylight faded into darkness. “Not that I want to come between a girl and her uncle, but…”

“No, you’re right,” Daniel said. He released Joyce’s hand, picked up a pair of electric lanterns and handed them down. Then he climbed down into the pit himself.

Joyce led the way through the door. Gabriel followed and Daniel brought up the rear. The stale air inside the crypt was stifling. They followed a stone stairway down into darkness, their footsteps echoing off the walls, the lanterns lending an orange tint to their surroundings.

At the bottom of the steps, a long corridor stretched into the blackness. The lantern beams illuminated alcoves along the walls on either side. The bodies inside them had been mummified by the dry air, their skin shrunken against their bones like a thin layer of old leather, brown and cracked; but their armor remained mostly intact, preserved by the lack of moisture. As the lantern light passed along the corpses’ empty eye sockets, it almost looked like the dead soldiers were watching them pass.

Ahead, the corridor led through an archway into a small chamber where colored light shimmered against the wall. But instead of the green light they’d seen in the other two crypts, this time the light was a deep, rich crimson. Gabriel raised his lantern up over his head and Joyce did the same with hers. At the far end of the chamber, atop a pedestal and gripped in a stone hand, sat an enormous ruby.

“Well, that’s different,” she said. She walked to the pedestal for a closer look.

“Be careful,” Gabriel said. “Don’t touch it yet.” He glanced up at the ceiling, wondering what trap the Hittite architects had in store for them this time.

“Look at this,” Joyce said. “The inscription is different, too.” She held her lantern up to the wall behind the pedestal. Nesili symbols were carved into the rock—but more of them this time than there had been in the other crypts.

“Fascinating,” Daniel said, stepping forward.

“Want to do the honors?” Gabriel asked. “My Nesili’s okay, but I’m not the best sight reader.”

Daniel translated as Joyce moved the light slowly across the symbols. “ ‘Three armies will determine its fate…’ It’s the final verse of the legend. It explains how, when the time comes, three armies will determine how the Spearhead will be used—as a force for destruction or as something that benefits mankind. And it describes Teshub’s final judgment as to whether mankind is wise enough to possess the Spearhead.”

“I guess the answer was no,” Gabriel said.

“More like ‘not yet,’ ” Daniel said. “Teshub didn’t destroy it, after all. He hid it. And what’s hidden can be found.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you two get over by the door.” They went to stand by the archway while Gabriel carefully approached the ruby. “And if I say run, you run—understand? Don’t even look back, just get the hell out of here.”

Joyce nodded. “Be careful.”

Gabriel studied the ruby in the stone hand’s grasp. It was lit from within by the same natural iridescence as the emeralds had been. It had the same wide, flat octagonal cut, too, but this gem was bigger, almost twice the size of the others. As Gabriel reached for it, he heard the pitch of the electrical hum emanating from it change and felt the hairs on the back of his arm stand straight up. He took hold of the ruby with both hands and lifted it gently out of the stone fingers’ grasp. The stone felt warm in his hands, and the electrical charge it gave off was much stronger than that of the second Eye.

The fingers of the stone hand began to scrape closed. Gabriel backed away, watching the ceiling for any signs of movement. There weren’t any—in the ceiling. But the whole chamber began to shake, almost as if the area were in the grip of an earthquake. Daniel put one arm around Joyce and braced himself in the archway. Sand sifted down from cracks in the ceiling.

“Run,” Gabriel said.

They raced out of the chamber and into the corridor, sprinting toward the steps leading up to the desert. Knocked free by the tremors, the mummified bodies tumbled out of their alcoves and smashed against the floor. In the lead, Joyce leapt over one and kept going, while Daniel, limping on his bad leg, took pains to skirt another. Behind them both, Gabriel hurtled over one only to find another falling against him. He found himself wrestling with a corpse, its shriveled head inches from his face, the mummified jaw hanging open in an eternal expression of shock. Gabriel shoved the body aside and kept running, taking the stairs two at a time while the crypt trembled and shook around him.

Outside, he pulled himself quickly out of the pit. Joyce and Daniel were already standing on the sand, looking around nervously. A deep rumbling continued to emanate from somewhere below, but none of the baobabs in the distance were swaying, no animals had run into the open. Definitely not an earthquake, Gabriel thought. Something rarer and stranger was happening.

“What’s that?” Joyce shouted, pointing.

A few dozen yards away, the sand had begun to undulate, bulging upward in the shape of an enormous dome. A massive stone broke through the surface and kept rising, the sand pouring off its sides. Initially it looked like it was only a dome, a smaller version of Uluru in Australia, perhaps, an extrusion resulting from plate tectonics. But after a moment it became apparent that this was no mere dome. Because the next thing that came into view as the stone continued rising was a pair of roughly carved eyes. The eyes were followed by an enormous carved nose. It was a giant stone head—then a giant bearded head—then a head and neck—then head, neck, and shoulders—and still it came, this giant figure, displacing tons of sand as it emerged into the night air. The figure’s wide shoulders appeared, then its chest, its torso. Its arms; its hips and thighs; its knees. Gabriel watched as the titanic figure emerged, until finally the statue towered seventy feet above them, silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

Daniel stepped forward, staring with awe. “Teshub.”

The statue of Teshub stood silently before them, one hand at its side, the other held out, palm up, as if offering something to his followers. But the hand was empty. The Spearhead wasn’t there.

“Look at the eyes,” Daniel said, craning his neck to do so.

The statue’s eyes were wide, blank ovals of stone, and where the iris of each eye should have been was a dark, empty socket, that looked just about deep enough for one of the gemstones to fit inside.

“Fascinating,” Daniel said. “The storm god risen from the desert sand, awaiting the return of his eyes, and ready to give his gift to the world. Have you ever seen anything so magnificent?”

Before Gabriel could answer, they all heard the roar of engines behind them. Turning, Gabriel saw a half dozen jeeps speeding toward them across the desert, clouds of sand billowing in their wake. Gabriel cursed under his breath and drew his Colt. Even before he saw the man’s face through the grimy windshield of the lead jeep, he knew it was Grissom. And Grissom had brought an army with him. With five or six men in each jeep, they were hopelessly outnumbered.

The jeeps pulled to a stop a few yards in front of them. Grissom and his men climbed out of the vehicles and raised a variety of shotguns and automatic handguns into view.

Grissom stepped forward. “Well, well. Here we are again.” He reached out his free hand for the gemstone. “Hand it over.”

Gabriel cocked the hammer of his Colt.

“Come now, Mr. Hunt. I know you’re an excellent shot. And I know,” Grissom said, his face clouding over for a moment, a twitch pounding on his temple, “that you have no qualms about taking a life. But I don’t think of you as suicidal. And how long do you think you’d live after you pulled that trigger? How long would your friends live? It would be a foolish gesture.”

Gabriel surveyed the crowd around them. Six jeeps, some three dozen men, all of them armed and all of them looking well trained in the use of arms. He ground his teeth. He wasn’t confident they’d live a whole lot longer if he lowered his gun, but in cases like this, every minute was worth something. He tossed the Colt onto the sand.

“Now the gemstones.”

Gabriel looked at the ruby in his hand. Its energy buzzed along his arm, a thousand feathers tickling on his skin.

Grissom held out his hand. “My men aren’t used to having to restrain themselves, Mr. Hunt. I will not ask again.”

Gabriel handed the ruby to Grissom, who slipped it into one of the large side pockets of his cargo vest. He turned to the gunman beside him, a man with a pockmarked face and an eyepatch over his right eye. He wore a bandolier filled with shells across his chest and was carrying a pump-action shotgun. “Bring me the other one, DeVoe,” Grissom said. The mercenary went to the jeep, retrieved a black velvet sack and brought it back. Grissom took the sack from him, opened it, and let the emerald from Borneo slide onto his palm. He slid it into another pocket of his vest.

Grissom turned back to Gabriel. “Now, the last one. The gemstone from Turkey.”

“Sorry, but I can’t give you that one,” Gabriel said. “We don’t have it anymore.”

Grissom’s stare darkened. “What are you talking about?”

“It was stolen on the way over here,” Gabriel said. “By the Cult of Ulikummis.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Grissom said, and he laughed. “It was stolen, was it? By the, what is it, by the cult of…?” He turned to his men. “It was stolen from them!” His men didn’t move. Grissom spun, his fist connecting with Gabriel’s face. Unprepared for the blow, Gabriel fell backward, landing hard on the sand. Joyce launched herself toward Grissom, her hands balled into fists, but Daniel grabbed her and held her back. Gabriel got to his feet again, wiping blood from his nose on the back of his hand.

“Enough games, Hunt,” Grissom said. “Give me the other gemstone.”

Gabriel spat on the sand. “I can’t. It’s gone. You can search us if you don’t believe me.”

Grissom spoke to DeVoe: “Do it. Search their jeep, and search them.”

DeVoe gave instructions to several of the other men and within minutes a thorough search had been completed. DeVoe took responsibility himself for patting them down, taking rather longer in Joyce’s case than would have been necessary just to confirm she didn’t have a softball-sized emerald on her person. Gabriel saw her gritting her teeth as the eyepatched mercenary worked his way up and down her person.

“Nothing,” DeVoe reported.

“All right, Hunt,” Grissom said, stepping forward and whipping out the ivory-handled dagger. In a flash its three blades were open and glinting in the moonlight. “Where is it?”

“I told you,” Gabriel said. “The Cult of Ulikummis took it.”

“And where, exactly,” Grissom said, raising the dagger to Gabriel’s throat, “did they take it?”

Gabriel stared over Grissom’s shoulder. “Apparently,” he said, “right here.”

Grissom turned, and his men turned with him. Several yards behind them, standing silent in the darkness, was an army of skull-masked men in white robes, at least one hundred of them, their bows loaded with arrows and ready to be fired. At the head of the army stood the high priest. The stolen emerald was lashed with rope to the top of his staff. They heard him shout a single word to his men.

The cultists released their bowstrings, and a wave of arrows sailed across the sky toward them.

Chapter 23

“Take cover!” Grissom shouted. He and his men scattered, crouching behind the jeeps as the arrows bore down. Gabriel snatched his gun off the ground and, together with Joyce and Daniel, ran toward the statue, the only other source of cover in sight. Behind them, the arrows came down, landing in the sand or bouncing loudly off the hoods and frames of the jeeps. Gabriel heard several of Grissom’s men cry out, but he didn’t turn around or stop running until he reached the statue. Ducking behind one of its massive stone legs, he grabbed Joyce’s arm and pulled her down next to him. Daniel dropped to the sand behind her.

Grissom’s men frantically signaled each other and shifted position behind the jeeps. The cult let loose another volley of arrows and, under cover of the assault, ran forward, exchanging their bows for swords. Grissom’s men opened fire as they came, the chatter of automatic weapons erupting loudly in the night. The smell of gunsmoke drifted over to where Gabriel was, that and the smell of blood.

Gabriel turned away from the battlefield. Daniel was still watching the battle, an expression of horror on his face. “The three armies,” he murmured.

“I only see two,” Joyce said.

Daniel turned to her. “No, there are three. The cult, Grissom’s men…and us.”

Gabriel raised his gun. He had six bullets. “Some army.”

Cult members dropped under the avalanche of gunfire, their white-robed bodies littering the sand, but more kept coming, flooding into Grissom’s men like a tidal wave, transforming the battle into hand-to-hand combat, where they had the advantage. Swords clashed against shotguns raised to block them.

Scanning across the carnage, Gabriel realized he didn’t see Grissom in the thick of things—or the high priest, for that matter.

A figure suddenly rounded the statue’s leg: DeVoe. “Hold it!” he said, leveling his shotgun at Gabriel.

Gabriel swung his leg out, sweeping it across DeVoe’s feet and knocking the mercenary backward onto the ground. He jumped on top of him, wrestled the shotgun out of his hands, and butted DeVoe in the face with the stock. DeVoe groaned briefly and fell back, unconscious. Gabriel pocketed a handful of DeVoe’s extra shells, then stood up and inspected the shotgun. Their army had just doubled its arms. He tossed his Colt to Joyce. “Here, take this. And keep an eye on this guy—if he’s some sort of second in command, Grissom might actually value him, which would give us a bargaining chip.”

“I don’t think that man values anyone,” Joyce said. But she knelt beside the unconscious mercenary and aimed the gun at him. “What are you going to do?”

Gabriel opened the shotgun, inspected it quickly, and snapped it closed again. “I’m going to get the gemstones.”

“I guess Grissom was wrong,” Daniel said. “You are suicidal.”

Joyce leaned forward and kissed him. “Don’t go getting yourself killed,” she said quietly. “Not now. Not after all this.”

“I’ll do my best,” Gabriel said, and darted out from behind the statue’s leg.

As he went, skirting the edge of the fray, Gabriel looked for Grissom in the chaos and darkness. He finally spotted him at the far end. Grissom had picked up a fallen sword and was using it to block someone’s attack. At first Gabriel couldn’t make out who Grissom was fighting, but then another figure stepped out of the way and he saw the flash of a long metal staff swinging down to batter Grissom’s sword. The high priest. Grissom had gone straight for the missing gemstone himself.

Gabriel pumped a shell into the shotgun’s chamber and dove into the battle. He weaved around the first jeep in his path, butting a cult member in the head with the shotgun, then pulled the trigger and blew another off his feet. He shouldered past one of Grissom’s mercenaries, who spun on him with his handgun, and Gabriel blasted him aside. No favorites in this fight. Gunshots rang out all around him, the clash of swords, the cries of the wounded. He shoved his way past men locked in battle, ducked blades as they swung at him, and reloaded the shotgun as he went.

The fighting lessened as he broke through the crowd and made it to the spot where Grissom and the high priest were facing each other. The high priest whirled his staff, knocking the sword out of Grissom’s hand. Grissom backed away, out of reach of the staff’s bronze blade, and drew his ivory-handled dagger again—his weapon of last resort, it seemed. The two extra blades slid into view as he thumbed the hidden button. The cult leader didn’t look impressed.

Gabriel sprang forward, slamming the butt of the shotgun into Grissom’s back. Grissom dropped to his hands and knees, coughing hard. The cult leader looked startled for a moment, then lunged at Gabriel, who sidestepped the blade, knocking the staff aside with his shotgun. Something wrapped around his shins, tripping him, and as he fell he saw Grissom’s arms around his legs. Gabriel hit the sand hard. He swung the shotgun down toward Grissom, but the other man scrambled away, and suddenly Gabriel saw the high priest looming over him, the staff raised high over Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel rolled aside, and the blade sank into the sand. He got to his feet, leveling the shotgun at Grissom and the cult leader both, moving the barrel back and forth between them.

The three of them circled, Grissom with his dagger, the cult leader with his staff, and Gabriel with the shotgun. His finger twitched on the trigger. He was tempted to try to blast them both, but buckshot was hardly a precision projectile. If he shot at either of them, there was a good chance he’d hit the gemstones. He didn’t know what would happen if they shattered, but with the amount of energy they seemed barely to be containing he suspected it wouldn’t be good.

“We are at impasse,” the cult leader said, his words thick with a Russian accent. The emerald glowed at the top of his staff. “But not much longer. All Teshub’s Eyes are to me soon. And world will burn in Ulikummis hand.”

“Oh, just shoot this man already,” Grissom said to Gabriel. “If I have to listen to one more minute of his gibbering…”

“Quiet, both of you,” Gabriel said. “Now: give me the gemstones.”

“Give you the sacred eye?” the high priest spat. “Never.”

Grissom shrugged. “I’m certainly not going to give you anything. I suppose we are, as the man said, ‘at impasse.’”

Gabriel heard a sound then overhead, a sound loud enough to cut through the clamor of battle and bloodshed. It sounded like…a helicopter? He risked a glance up, but could only make out a blur high above him, something dark moving across the sky. What would a helicopter be doing out in the middle of the Kalahari Desert at night? Had it been drawn by the sound of gunfire, or had someone reported the sudden twilight appearance of a colossus half the height of the Statue of Liberty?

But the shape—copter or otherwise—sped out of sight before he could properly make it out and Gabriel returned his gaze to the scene before him. It had changed meaningfully even in the fraction of a second he’d looked away. At first, he had the impression that Grissom and the high priest were wrestling, standing so close together they seemed to be grappling with each other. It was only when the staff fell to the ground that Gabriel realized Grissom had stabbed his dagger into the high priest’s chest. Grissom shoved, driving the dagger deeper. The high priest dropped to his knees as Grissom tore the dagger out, then he fell forward onto the ground. Grissom grabbed the staff from where it lay in the sand and cut the emerald free from its lashings with a single swipe of the dagger’s razor-sharp blades.

Gabriel swung the shotgun toward Grissom and stepped forward so the barrel was just inches from his face.

“What are you going to do, Hunt, shoot me?” Grissom said calmly. “And risk destroying three priceless historical artifacts in the process? I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re the kind of man who—”

Gabriel jabbed the muzzle toward Grissom’s forehead. “You don’t know what kind of man I am.”

Grissom’s self-confident smile faded.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Gabriel said, “but I will if you don’t hand over the jewels.”

“Well, then, Hunt, you’ll have to shoot, because I’m not handing over a damn thing. But,” he said, “before you do, you might want to consider what will happen if you accidentally hit one of the jewels. Ah—I see you have been thinking about this. Good. You are wise not to pull the trigger. It could be like a nuclear explosion if it went wrong.” Grissom slid the third jewel—the emerald liberated from the high priest’s staff—into yet another pocket on his vest. The thing was bulging around him now like a life jacket.

“You have to make a choice, Hunt. There are only two options. Shoot me—and risk blowing us all up, and the statue, too—or let me go.”

“You’re wrong,” Gabriel told him. “There’s another choice.”

“Oh?”

Gabriel clubbed Grissom across the face with the shotgun’s stock. Grissom fell backward, dropping unconscious to the sand, a streak of blood across his mouth.

“There’s always another choice,” Gabriel said.

Hanging the shotgun over his shoulder by its strap, Gabriel knelt beside Grissom to pull the vest off him. He felt the jewels inside, knocking gently against one another through the padded fabric. The Three Eyes of Teshub. Together again, for the first time in millennia. Even through the fabric, the energy passing from one to the others made his palms tremble.

He hung the vest over his other shoulder. The Cult of Ulikummis and Grissom’s men, unaware that their leaders were out of commission, were continuing to struggle across the patch of desert standing between Gabriel and the statue. Which meant he had to go around. Cradling the vest under one arm, he started running, keeping to the outskirts and sprinting as fast as he could. Stray bullets zipped past him and puffed clouds out of the sand where they hit. He kept his head down. The statue loomed up ahead.

He glanced behind him as he skidded to a stop and in the distance saw Grissom climbing unsteadily back onto his feet. They wouldn’t have long. He turned to Joyce, who was standing beside Daniel with her arms by her sides. His Colt, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen—and neither was DeVoe. “What hap—” Gabriel began, but the question answered itself: Joyce shook her head sadly, apologetically, as DeVoe stepped into view, training Gabriel’s own weapon on him.

Gabriel ducked away, dashing around the statue’s leg. He heard a gunshot and saw a chip of stone fly off the statue where DeVoe’s bullet had hit.

Gabriel ran across the stretch of sand between the statue’s legs and took refuge behind the farther one. He clutched the shotgun to his chest, got his finger around the trigger, made ready to bring it out—but, glancing over, he saw that DeVoe had run behind Joyce and Daniel for cover. DeVoe raised the Colt above Joyce’s head and Gabriel snatched his head back—but very nearly too far back, since a gunshot rang out behind him, from the direction of the battlefield, and the bullet came within a hairbreadth of his ear. Gabriel’s back was exposed—but there was no way to protect it without putting himself in DeVoe’s sights. He looked up at the statue towering above him. There was only one way to get a better position.

Strapping the shotgun fully across his back, he 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. “Stop shooting, you fool! You’ll damage the gemstones!” Looking down he saw that Grissom had managed to cross the battlefield and was standing beside DeVoe. Grissom had picked up a shotgun, too, and he used it now to gesture at Joyce and Daniel. “Leave them to me. You get up there and stop him—and bring me those stones!”

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.

Pulling with all his might, Gabriel managed to get one leg over the edge of the giant stone palm. Breathing hard, he hauled himself the rest of the way over and lay back, panting. He unslung the shotgun and, rolling over onto his belly, pointed it at the mercenary’s head. He pulled the trigger. The man flinched—but nothing else happened. Gabriel pumped the shotgun and fired it again. Nothing. DeVoe grinned ruthlessly and pulled himself nearer while Gabriel pawed through his pockets. One more shell—he had to have at least one more…

The sound of whirling blades overhead cut the air for the second time that night. The helicopter was back, making a wide circle over the battlefield. It was long and sleek, but also wide, built to carry several men—a military vehicle. Against the darkening sky, Gabriel could just make out a green and black camouflage design on its hull. The side door slid back, and standing in the doorway was a man whose face was masked by a helmet and goggles. Something was balanced on his shoulder—a cylinder like a poster tube.

Or a missile launcher.

The vapor trail of a missile shot out of the weapon. It hit at the edge of the battlefield, its explosion sending up a wave of sand and smoke. Gabriel saw bodies tumble through the air, propelled by a blast that was strong enough to make the statue shake a dozen yards away. He saw DeVoe struggle to keep his grip, clinging like a spider to the statue’s belly. From the battlefield, bullets and arrows flew at the helicopter, which swerved away and disappeared into the night sky.

Gabriel finished going through his pockets—no shells.

He chanced a look down at the ground. Grissom swung his shotgun up to fire at him, but as he pulled the trigger Joyce reached up with one arm and clocked him on the side of the head. The gunshot went wide—and Grissom went down to his knees. Gabriel saw Joyce drop the stone she’d picked up from the ground and run over to the statue’s leg to begin climbing herself.

“No, Joyce—don’t come up here,” Gabriel called, but either she couldn’t hear or wasn’t listening, since she kept coming. And Gabriel had more immediate things to worry about, as DeVoe made the leap from the statue’s side to the thumb of its upturned hand. Gabriel bent to pry the mercenary’s fingers off the stone, but they were like steel. As he raised the stock of the shotgun to bring it down on DeVoe’s fingers, DeVoe swung his legs up, dealing Gabriel a savage kick in the temple. Gabriel fell sideways, almost toppling off the hand entirely. He felt a trickle of blood well up and touched the side of his face. His hand came away sticky. Steel-toed boots. An inch or two to the left and he’d have been wearing an eyepatch like DeVoe’s—assuming he’d survived at all.

DeVoe pulled himself up onto the palm. He drew Gabriel’s Colt from his belt, pointed it at him, and held out his free hand. Palm up, like Teshub’s. “Come on, Hunt. There’s nowhere for you to go. Just hand the jewels over.”

“You won’t shoot,” Gabriel said, panting. “You might damage the jewels. Maybe blow us all up.”

“You think I can’t put a bullet through your head without hitting that vest?” DeVoe said. “Does eight years as a sniper with the U.S. Army mean anything to you?”

“Bet you still had both your eyes back then,” Gabriel said. “And your depth perception.”

DeVoe cocked the gun and aimed it.

At that moment, the helicopter flew over them again. Another missile shot out of the open door in its side and landed in the middle of the battlefield. The explosion knocked both Gabriel and DeVoe off their feet. Gabriel managed to hold onto the statue’s stone fingers, but DeVoe teetered on the edge and went over, clawing at the air. Gabriel crawled to the edge. The mercenary was forty feet off the ground clinging to a fold of Teshub’s stone robe. Shaking his head to clear it, planting his feet solidly against the statue’s side, DeVoe started climbing again.

A glance in the other direction showed Gabriel that the battlefield had been thoroughly decimated. Bodies lay scattered across the sand. Few of the figures were moving on either side, and those that were were moving slowly—white robes crawling back toward the desert, bloodstained khaki fatigues toward the jeeps. The helicopter was flying off again, smoke trailing from bullet holes in its tail.

Who the hell is that? Gabriel thought. And whose side is he on—Grissom’s or the cult’s?

As Gabriel rose to his feet, he saw that, climbing swiftly, DeVoe had made it up to the statue’s shoulder. He watched as the mercenary climbed up to the crown of the statue’s head. Unfortunately, DeVoe had managed to hold onto the Colt, and now he had a perfect vantage point from which to use it.

“Gabriel!” Joyce shouted. He looked down. Joyce had reached the side of the statue directly across from the hand. Holding on with both knees and one hand, she flung something at him with the other—a handful of shotgun shells. One flew by well out of reach; he grabbed at the others. One landed squarely in his palm. Turning, he slammed the shell into the chamber and aimed at DeVoe, who was balanced atop the head and turning the Colt toward Gabriel. They both grabbed for their triggers—but Gabriel got to his first, the blast hitting DeVoe in the chest. The force of the buckshot knocked him backward off the statue. He cried out as he fell, twisting in the air. The mercenary slammed into the ground seventy feet below, his cry suddenly silenced.

Gabriel helped Joyce up onto the statue’s hand. She threw her arms around him and planted a kiss on his mouth.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“For not being dead,” she said. “Yet. Do you have the Eyes?”

“All three of them,” Gabriel said. He patted the vest, where the Three Eyes of Teshub felt like they were throbbing. He noticed they’d grown progressively warmer with their proximity to the statue.

A shotgun blast rang out, and a chunk at the end of the statue’s middle finger broke off. Gabriel peered down. Below, Grissom was aiming up at them. Gabriel ducked back as Grissom fired again, the buckshot peppering the edge where he’d been kneeling. He took one of the gemstones from the vest—the ruby—and handed it to Joyce. “We’ve got to split up,” he said. “Keep them away from Grissom.”

“We’re pretty far from Grissom up here,” Joyce said.

“Not for long,” Gabriel said, and pointed. Sure enough, Grissom had begun making the climb. Daniel tried to grab hold of his leg, but Grissom kicked him away, sending him sprawling.

Gabriel groped for another of the shotgun shells Joyce had thrown earlier; several lay scattered around the palm. He reloaded the gun, then took the vest and climbed with it precariously up Teshub’s bent arm and across to the statue’s massive head, balancing with both arms out like a high-wire walker. He stopped beside one of the figure’s ears. Looking back, he saw that Joyce was still standing on the upturned palm—and Grissom was coming closer by the second.

“Joyce, get away!” he shouted.

She stuffed the ruby under her belt, but didn’t move off the hand. Grissom was started to make his move across, his shotgun strapped across his back.

“Joyce!” Gabriel cried again.

“I can take care of this bastard,” she said. Standing over Grissom, she pulled back one leg to kick out at his head—but he snaked an arm around her other ankle and yanked, bringing her crashing down.

Grissom pulled himself the rest of the way onto Teshub’s palm and swung the shotgun off his back. He leveled it at Joyce. “Get up,” he said. “Slowly.” Grissom kept the gun on her as she did. The ruby glinted at her waist.

Sighting down the barrel of his shotgun from his perch by the statue’s ear, Gabriel cursed under his breath. There was no way he could pull the trigger without spraying them both with buckshot. He thought of what Joyce said back in Borneo, that if he had to make a choice between saving her and stopping Grissom, he should forget about her and do what needed to be done. She’d meant it, and he’d promised that he would. The trigger felt cold against his fingertip. His heart hammered his ribs. Sweat trickled from his forehead.

The question was whether he could do it.

He looked down into Joyce’s eyes and lowered the shotgun.

Grissom came around behind her, using her as a shield, the shotgun pointed up at her head. It was an awkward angle, but by bending over slightly he managed to keep his finger on the trigger. “If you don’t want to see your lovely friend’s brains spread across the desert, throw down the gun and come back here now. This is it, Hunt—the end of the line.” He smiled, but there was nothing of pleasure in it. “World’s End,” he said.

Chapter 24

Gabriel aimed the shotgun again, but all he could see was half of Grissom’s head behind Joyce’s grimacing face. “I’m in no mood to repeat myself,” Grissom called. He grabbed Joyce’s hair, pulling her head back, and with his other hand jammed the shotgun muzzle under her jaw.

Gabriel lowered the shotgun and let it drop from his hands. It sailed down from where he stood until it was lost in darkness. They heard it land on the sand below.

“Very good,” Grissom said. “Now come back here.”

Gabriel walked along the statue’s outstretched arm back to the hand.

Grissom’s eyes narrowed as he watched Gabriel approach. “No surprises, Hunt.” He pushed the muzzle harder against Joyce’s jaw.

“Don’t do it, Gabriel,” Joyce managed to say through clenched teeth.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Gabriel said.

“You’ve got to—” she began, but Grissom silenced her with another jab of the gun.

“Now,” Grissom said. “Please take the ruby.”

“Take it?”

“Yes,” Grissom said. “Thousands of years ago, the Hittite Empire hid the Three Eyes of Teshub around the world. Now, I am going to let you have the honor of being the man who gives them back.”

Gabriel lifted the ruby out from under Joyce’s belt. He could see how rapidly she was breathing. She was frightened—but of what? That Grissom would pull the trigger? Or that he wouldn’t, because Gabriel would do what he wanted?

“Let her go,” Gabriel said. “I’ll do it—but let her climb down. Her uncle can get her to safety.”

“Not just yet,” Grissom said. “Miss Wingard is my insurance policy…aren’t you, my dear?” He stroked her cheek with the gun barrel, then turned back to Gabriel. “You’ll do exactly as I say, or she dies. If you run, she dies. If you drop the gemstones, she dies. If you try anything at all, she dies. Am I being clear enough?”

“Perfectly,” Gabriel said. He looked at Joyce. Her eyes pleaded with him not to do it. He looked back at Grissom. “What do you want me to do?”

“You can start by returning to the top of the head,” Grissom said. “Go slowly, so I can see what you’re up to at all times. I’ll tell you what to do next once you’re there.”

Gabriel put the ruby back in the vest’s largest pocket and walked carefully along the statue’s arm. He climbed up onto the shoulder and from there up the slope toward the head. Halfway up, his foot slipped on some loose sand still covering the stone. He groped with his fingers for a handhold and found a seam between stones just deep enough to hold onto. His heart pounding, he looked down at the ground seventy feet below. He’d almost gone the way DeVoe had. He took a second to make sure of his footing, then pulled himself upright and moved slowly until he was standing between the shoulder and neck again.

Up close, he could see that Teshub’s face had been carved from two blocks of stone. A long, narrow seam ran from the bridge of the nose down to the tip of the beard, though, oddly, he saw no mortar in the seam, nothing visibly holding the two pieces together. Using the statue’s ear as a ladder, he climbed up the side of the head.

“Good,” Grissom called when Gabriel reached the top. “Now, give Teshub back his eyes. Slowly! Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Gabriel lay on his stomach and let his head hang down so he could inspect the statue’s eyes. The two sockets looked identical, and measuring them against his hand, he saw they’d fit the emeralds—not the ruby. Gabriel pulled one of the emeralds from the vest. It seemed to hum louder as he brought it near the right eye. As he slid the gemstone into place, he felt it lock in. The glow emanating from the center of the emerald grew stronger until it became a bright green light, shining out across the desert like a lighthouse beam.

He looked over at Joyce and Grissom on the statue’s palm. They were both staring at the beam, awed. Grissom collected himself enough to say, “Now do the other one.”

Gabriel pulled the second emerald from the vest pocket and put it in the socket in the left eye. Another shaft of bright green light shot out from the statue’s head, joining the first. A deep, throbbing rumble sounded from within the statue. It pulsed over and over, almost like a heartbeat.

“Now the last one,” Grissom said.

Gabriel pulled out the ruby. He looked down at Teshub’s huge face but didn’t see anyplace he could put it. The openings in both eyes were filled. The mouth was closed, with no open space between the lips where the ruby could fit. There were no holes for the third gemstone at all.

“Where does it go?” Gabriel called down.

“I don’t know,” Grissom called back. “But you’d better figure it out quickly.” He jabbed Joyce again with the gun. “Any ideas, Miss Wingard?”

“Drop dead,” Joyce said.

“That’s an idea, all right,” Grissom said, “but I don’t know that you really should be suggesting it to a man who’s got a gun on you. Hunt,” he called, “you’ve got till a count of three, then your friend here goes over the side.”

The deep, pulsing rumble continued echoing across the desert. Gabriel looked down at the face again, the twin jade beams shooting out of its eyes. Teshub only had two eyes, as Daniel had pointed out. So where the hell did the third jewel go?

“One!” Grissom shouted.

A final riddle. Gabriel felt certain the answer was right in front of him. It had to have something to do with the legend. He thought back, racing through everything he’d learned: the Spearhead, a powerful device supposedly given to the Hittites by the storm god that could be used for good or evil, and then taken away because Teshub didn’t trust them to make the right choice; the Three Eyes, supercharged gemstones that activated the Spearhead, scattered across the world to keep them from being found, to keep the Spearhead out of mankind’s hands until…

Until what?

“Two!” Grissom shouted.

Gabriel looked at the ruby, trying to clear everything else out of his mind and focus on the legend. Teshub hid the Spearhead because mankind couldn’t be trusted with its power.

Because they didn’t have the judgment to keep it from being used for evil.

No, not the judgment. That wasn’t the word the legend used. The legend said wisdom. The Spearhead would be hidden from mankind until they had the wisdom to use it for good.

And then he knew. Something he should have seen right away. The third eye. It appeared over and over again in the mythology of Eastern cultures, the eye of wisdom. How many times had he seen Buddhist sutras that illustrated the third eye, the eye that wasn’t an eye, drawn right in the middle of the forehead? Hell, he suddenly realized the Death’s Head Key had one on it, the diamond shape between the eyes of the skull…

“Three!”

“Hold on!” Gabriel shouted. “Wait! I’ve got it!”

Gabriel reached down and touched the smooth stone of the statue’s forehead, between the eyes. That was another clue, he realized now: the visible seam between the two blocks of stone began lower down, at the bridge of the nose; there had to be a reason it didn’t continue all the way up to the top of the head. Gabriel felt around for a hidden seam, one he couldn’t see. He felt it a moment later, a hairline groove delineating a rectangular area above the nose. Gently at first and then more firmly, he pressed against it. Under this pressure, one half of a small slab swung inward on a hidden axle, while the other half swung out. He turned the convex slab all the way around until it was concave, a depression in the center of the forehead. And at the center of this depression he saw a socket. He didn’t have to measure it to know it was the size and shape of the ruby.

He placed the last jewel into the socket and felt it lock in place. Like the emeralds, its internal glow intensified until a bright red beam shot out, riding atop the twin green ones. The pulsing thrum that emanated from the statue grew louder and Gabriel heard a grinding deep inside, like the sound of ancient gears beginning to turn.

Gabriel scrambled off the statue’s head and hurried back along the shoulder and arm to the outstretched hand. Grissom still had the shotgun positioned under Joyce’s chin, but he was staring at the beams of light. Gabriel was, too. The three beams intensified to an almost blinding brightness. He shielded his eyes.

And then, suddenly, the Three Eyes of Teshub went dark. Snapped off like blown lightbulbs.

“What happened?” Grissom whispered.

The statue began to shake. Gabriel had trouble keeping his footing. Behind Joyce, Grissom slipped, falling to one knee. Joyce kicked backward, finally connecting with Grissom’s head. He landed on his back, the shotgun skittering out of his grip. He started to get back to his feet, groping for the weapon, but Joyce tackled him, driving one shoulder into his chest.

“No!” Gabriel shouted and grabbed for her—but in an instant they had gone over the side. Gabriel rushed to the edge and looked down. They hit the sand, Grissom on the bottom, beneath Joyce. They hit with the terrible crack of bones breaking. Turning, he leapt across the gap separating Teshub’s hand from his torso, grabbed onto the folds of the storm god’s robe as DeVoe had, and began letting himself down swiftly, hand over hand. When he reached the statue’s leg, he slid down it, letting himself drop the last fifteen feet. Even from that height, the impact wasn’t pleasant—he could imagine what it had been like from more than twice as high. All he could hope was that Grissom had absorbed the worst of it.

He ran over to where Joyce lay. Daniel was there beside her, holding her hand. She’d rolled off Grissom but hadn’t moved any farther. “Can you stand?” Daniel was saying. “Can you sit up?”

Joyce nodded slowly. “I think so.” But she winced terribly when she tried it and didn’t make it all the way up.

Gabriel looked down at Grissom. He was moaning softly, between wracking coughs.

“My back…” he whispered. “My…”

Blood misted on his lips.

Meanwhile, the statue’s tremors were accelerating, the noise of internal gears growing louder. As Gabriel looked up at it, the statue split suddenly in half, right down the middle, and bright white light spilled out from the opening seam. Each leg split separately down its own seam, though no light came out of those. But the more the seam along the face and torso widened, the more light came pouring out, flooding the entire area. The statue started coming apart as it broke open, huge pieces of stone crashing to the sand below: a thumb, a boulder-sized chunk of Teshub’s robe, the top of his head containing the burned-out Eyes. Inside the collapsing outer shell another shape was being revealed: a monumental crystal obelisk on a forked stand, almost like a giant wishbone or divining rod, nearly as tall as the statue itself. Thick iron bands surrounded the crystal at intervals, connected to long metal posts on either side. The stone was pure white, like a piece of quartz. It emitted a deep, earthshaking hum and blazed from within.

The light at World’s End.

“The Spearhead,” Grissom whispered, and his eyes slid shut forever.

A column of light blasted up from the obelisk into the sky like a beacon. Dark, roiling storm clouds appeared above the Spearhead and circled the column. Lightning flashed inside the clouds.

Gabriel struggled to his feet.

“It’s magnificent,” Daniel said. “Still operational after all these thousands of years. It must be some kind of natural generator, but how can it contain so much power?”

Gabriel knelt beside Joyce and slipped one arm under her lower back, one under her knees. He lifted her off the ground. She bent her head toward him, gave his neck a small kiss. “My hero,” she said.

“Daniel,” Gabriel said. “We have to go.”

“We can’t just leave it…”

“Watch me,” Gabriel said, and turned to leave.

Only to find himself face-to-face with the high priest of the Cult of Ulikummis.

The man was leaning heavily on his staff. The front of his robe was soaked through with blood, and a trail of blood extended behind him. But he’d somehow made it this far, and wouldn’t be stopped now. He bent the staff forward and swung it in a tight arc that would have drawn blood if Gabriel hadn’t stepped back, Joyce still in his arms.

The high priest muttered something in Nesili.

“He says he has to receive Ulikummis,” Daniel said. “That he is Ulikummis’s vessel on earth.”

The high priest dragged himself another step forward. He was nearly standing between the forks of the apparatus on which the crystal stood.

Joyce spoke softly, her voice strained. “Put me down. You’ve got…got to stop him.”

But it was Daniel who stepped into the high priest’s path. He swung Gabriel’s Colt up before him, the gun held in both hands. “Not another step,” he said.

The priest sneered and started swinging his staff.

Daniel pulled the trigger. Twice.

The bullets slammed into the high priest’s chest and he jerked from each impact. He staggered—one step—two—and then collapsed on the ground directly beneath the crystal.

A thunderous explosion sounded overhead. Jagged bolts of lightning crackled in the air between the storm clouds and the Spearhead, each blasting the other with raw electrical energy. The light from the obelisk grew brighter, a hundred suns dawning in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. Gabriel used one hand to turn Joyce’s face into his neck and squeezed his own eyes shut. He began running away from the Spearhead, Daniel running beside him as fast as his limping gait could take him. Even through his closed eyelids, Gabriel saw the bright light that washed over them, past them, extending outward into the night. It was warm, but not as hot as he’d expected. He kept running, waiting for the burning blast that would finish them.

It never arrived. When the light had dimmed and the temperature cooled, he stopped running and opened his eyes. The storm clouds had vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. The Spearhead still glowed, but with waning intensity. In a wide circle around it, the sand had turned to glass, stopping less than a yard from where Gabriel, Joyce and Daniel now stood.

And below the Spearhead, where the high priest had lain, a figure was now standing—a figure blazing with a vibrant white light, similar to the crystal’s. Could this be the priest? That he was upright at all was extraordinary—he’d been stabbed and shot twice, he must have lost a gallon of blood. But the energy of the Spearhead seemed to have flowed into him and was animating him like some sort of puppet. He jerked from side to side. It was as if his body had somehow absorbed the immense power of the Spearhead and was desperately trying to contain it. He bent double, gripping his head in his hands. They heard him begin keening in a voice suffused with pain. The light pouring off of him intensified to a blinding glare. A moment later the light dimmed, then vanished altogether.

It took a moment before they could see at all. When their eyes adjusted, there were only the stars that dotted the night sky, and the moon hanging over the horizon. The obelisk was dark, its once clear crystal smoky and cracked.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked Joyce.

She nodded. “What happened? Where’s the priest?”

Gabriel looked toward the spot where he had stood, but there was no sign of him—not his robes, not his staff, not his body. Only the trail of blood, leading up to a point beneath the forked stand.

“Killed by the Spearhead,” Daniel said. “Vaporized.”

“It really was a weapon,” Gabriel said.

“At that moment it was, yes. Who’s to say what it could have been in the right hands?”

“There are no hands I’d trust with a power like this,” Gabriel said.

A loud cracking sound drew their attention back to the obelisk. Deep fissures spread across the crystal like spiderwebs. The crystal broke apart, sliding out of its iron supports and coming down with a crash amid the rubble from the statue.

“Well, it looks like you won’t have to,” Daniel said. He shook his head. “What a terrible loss.”

Gabriel heard the approaching helicopter’s rotors before he saw it overhead. He looked up. The wind blew back his hair and rustled his shirt. The helicopter descended, landing close enough for him to see the emergency foam patches sealing the bullet holes in its tail. The side door slid open, and four men in flight suits, helmets and goggles jumped out. Three of them held machine guns and stood in formation, looking out at the bodies scattered across the battlefield, watching for movement. The question Gabriel had posed earlier came back to him: Which army’s side were these men on?

But he only wondered it until the fourth man pulled off his helmet and goggles.

“Noboru?” Gabriel said, amazed.

Noboru rushed over to his side. He looked down at Joyce, stroked one hand across her hair. “I couldn’t just leave the two of you. Not when I still had something I could offer.”

“Does Michiko know?” Joyce asked.

“Sh,” Noboru said.

“You know this man?” Daniel asked.

“How did you find us?” Gabriel said.

“You can thank your brother,” Noboru said. “Michael told me where you were headed from Turkey. He sounded worried, figured you might get yourself in trouble again. That seemed likely to me, too. I thought maybe you could use some backup.”

“How’d you get your hands on a helicopter like this?” Gabriel asked. “Never mind the missiles.”

“I called in a few favors from my Intelligence days,” Noboru said. “It took a bit of finagling, but I got the team and equipment I asked for.”

“I’m just…glad you found us,” Joyce whispered.

Noboru looked at the bodies and wreckage all around them. “You guys are hard to miss.”

Daniel stuck out his hand. “Daniel Wingard. Joyce’s uncle.”

Noboru shook Daniel’s hand. He looked across the stretch of fused sand at the broken shards that were all that was left of the Spearhead. “We saw that thing’s light miles away, when we were patching the chopper. What the hell was it?”

“A test,” Daniel said. “After everything, it was just a test to see if mankind is ready to use something that powerful responsibly.”

“How’d we do?” Noboru asked.

Gabriel gave a thin smile. “We survived.”

Noboru nodded, then patted the side of the helicopter. “So. You guys need a lift?”

Chapter 25

The bartender in the Discoverers League lounge, Wade Boland, slid two bottles of beer across the bar to Gabriel. “Women who like beer are something special,” he said. “You try to hold onto this one.”

Clyde Harris, sitting on his usual stool at the end at the bar, chuckled and ran a hand through his thinning white hair. “Reminds me of a woman I met in the Netherlands back in ‘43. She loved beer almost as much as she loved garroting spies.”

Wade shook his head. “Save it, old-timer. Can’t you see he’s busy?”

Gabriel took the bottles back to the table by the fireplace and sat down in the plush red chair across from Joyce. After dropping them off at the embassy in Botswana, Noboru had returned to Borneo. Daniel was back in Turkey, closing down his dig site, and had promised to join them in New York in a few days’ time. Gabriel looked at his watch. Michael would be coming over in a bit over an hour for a full debriefing. But until then, Gabriel and Joyce could finally relax. No bullets, no arrows, no explosions, just the two of them and some stress-free time alone.

She took one of the bottles from him with the arm that wasn’t in a cast, clinked it against his bottle, and took a sip. “It’s a shame about the Spearhead.”

“Your uncle seems to think everything played out the way it was meant to.”

“That’s not what I mean, though,” she said. “It’s a shame we didn’t get to study it, find out what it was. How it worked. How a civilization thousands of years in the past could have created something that channeled and contained so much energy. It was like some kind of reactor, built long before there should have been anything close to that kind of technology.” She took another sip. “Now we’ll never know. It’s gone, all of it. The Spearhead, the gemstones.”

“Not all of it.” Gabriel reached into his shirt and pulled out the Death’s Head Key dangling from the leather strap around his neck. “We still have this.”

Joyce smiled. “True. What are you going to do with it?”

Gabriel pulled the strap over his head and looked at the key. “There are plenty of museums that I’m sure would love to have it for their collections. A few universities would love to study it, publish papers about it. I’m sure National Geographic and Discovery would love some photographs.”

Joyce nodded. “I suppose.”

“But I wasn’t planning on doing any of that,” Gabriel said. He held it out to her. “I was thinking you should have it.”

“Me? Why?”

“You earned it,” he said. “The Three Eyes of Teshub, the Spearhead, they were your finds, not mine. You should have it.”

She took the Death’s Head Key from him and hung it around her neck. Her eyes sparkled. “I don’t know what to say.” Then she laughed. “It’s so silly. Some women get all choked up over jewelry, but with me it’s a rusty old key.”

Gabriel laughed. “Just one of your many endearing qualities. So what are you going to do now? Are you going to take Daniel’s advice and apply for an academic job, or are you going to keep hitting the field to see what else is out there?”

“We’ll see,” she said. Then she smiled mischievously. “I like to keep people guessing.”

“Like I said, what would the world do without Joyce Wingard to keep things interesting?”

She leaned across the table, pulled him close with her good arm, and kissed him. “Is that interesting enough?”

“We’ll see,” he said. “This may require further study.”

Behind the bar, Wade turned to Clyde and said, “We had a bet, old-timer. Pay up.”

Muttering under his breath, Clyde slid a twenty-dollar bill across the bar.

Preview

And now—a

sneak preview of

the next Gabriel Hunt adventure:

HUNT BEYOND THE

FROZEN FIRE

“I’d ask what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this,” Gabriel told the brunette sitting at the bar with her back to him, “but I already know exactly what you’re doing.”

The brunette spun, reaching for the revolver beside her glass, but Gabriel grabbed her wrist before she could raise it to draw a bead between his eyes.

“I also know you’re not a very nice girl,” Gabriel said, tightening his grip and meeting her furious gaze without flinching.

The bar was a murky, nameless Moldovan hole-in-the-wall, spitting distance from the Transdniestrian border. The angry brunette was Dr. Fiona Rush, professor in Cambridge University’s prestigious archeology department and partner in Gabriel Hunt’s latest Eastern European expedition. She had also been Gabriel’s lover, which made it all the worse when she’d double-crossed him and run off with the legendary jewel-encrusted Cossack dagger they’d come here to find. There were some who claimed that the kindjal was cursed, that it would bring sorrow and strife to anyone who possessed it. After everything he’d been through in the past few days, Gabriel was inclined to agree.

When Gabriel grabbed Fiona’s wrist, all conversation around them abruptly ceased. Several men nearby, taller even than Gabriel and twice as wide, raised weapons and cold, hostile glares and aimed both in Gabriel’s direction. For a tense stretch of seconds, nothing happened. A Romanian melody fought its way through the static on a cheap transistor radio behind the bar. The ancient, toothless bartender suddenly remembered something critical that needed to be done right away in the storeroom in the back. Gabriel silently tried to decide which of the armed men posed the most serious threat and to measure where they were located in relation to both the front and back doors. He did not let go of Fiona’s wrist.

Fiona shook her head, offering a few curt words in Romanian. The thugs pocketed their various weapons, some more reluctantly than others. They all continued to stare at Gabriel with undisguised hostility. It was clear it wouldn’t take much for the weapons to reappear. Gabriel let Fiona go, but stayed alert and wary.

“Have a drink,” Fiona said, casually, as if she’d just happened to run into an old friend. She took an extra glass from the rack above the bar and poured a generous knock of the rich Moldovan brandy known as divin. “You must be thirsty.”

“I don’t want a drink,” Gabriel said, pushing the glass away. “I want the kindjal.”

“You’re not still cross about that, are you?” Fiona smiled and topped off her own glass from the dusty bottle. “Honestly, it was nothing personal.”

“Did you think you could just cut me out and sell to the highest bidder?” Gabriel asked. “That dagger is a significant historical artifact. It should be on display in a museum, not locked up by some rich collector. You of all people ought to know that.”

“You know what your problem is, Gabriel?” Fiona arched a dark eyebrow. “You’re still laboring under this charmingly anachronistic sense of right and wrong. This is the 21st century. You need to be more…” She took a sip of her divin and looked up at Gabriel with the sultry gaze that had gotten him into this trouble in the first place. “More flexible.”

“No more games, Fiona,” Gabriel said. “I know you’re planning on meeting your buyer in this bar, but I also know you’re too smart to have the kindjal on hand for the negotiation. So where is it?”

“We could split the money,” Fiona said, dropping a hand to Gabriel’s thigh. “We can just claim the kindjal was stolen. That sort of thing happens all the time in this part of the world. No one will ever be the wiser.”

“Where is it?” Gabriel asked again, pushing her hand away. “I’m asking nicely. Next time I ask, it won’t be so nice.”

“You really are going to be tedious about this, aren’t you?” Fiona sighed and emptied her glass, but when she tried for another refill, she found the bottle empty. “Fine, I’ll take you to it. But first let’s have one more drink, shall we? For old times’ sake.”

She gestured to the bartender, who had tentatively crept back to his post when it appeared there would be no violence after all. Holding her glass up high, she called out something in Romanian that caused the entire bar to turn her way. Amazingly, the chilly scowls all melted into broad, gap-toothed smiles. Glasses were raised all around and suddenly Gabriel was surrounded by thick, strapping men slapping him on the back and shaking his hand.

“What the hell did you say to them?” Gabriel asked, searching for Fiona between the moving mountain range of giant shoulders and flushed, grinning faces.

“I told them drinks were on you,” Fiona said with a smirk as the bartender obligingly opened a bottle of vodka and began filling upraised glasses. “I also said that you were a big American movie director from Hollywood looking for Moldavans to cast in your new picture.”

An enormous ox with a blond beard suddenly pulled Gabriel into an aromatic bear hug as if he were a longlost brother. Someone began singing a patriotic song loud and off-key and the ox enthusiastically joined in, slapping Gabriel’s back so hard it nearly knocked him off his feet. Another equally large but beardless thug tapped Gabriel on the shoulder and began demonstrating a terrifyingly drunken knife trick on the bar, weaving the blade back and forth between fat sausage fingers.

Gabriel tried to keep Fiona in view, but she vanished between two of the bar’s larger patrons.

Gabriel pressed far too many Moldovan lei into the astonished bartender’s hand and bulled his way through the crowd toward the open back door. He was almost waylaid by a pair of eager Moldavians clamoring for their free drink, but he managed to break free and make it to the door. When he burst through, he found himself in a narrow alley barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. He heard the clatter of horses’ hooves approaching. There was only one streetlight in this remote village and, in typical Moldovan fashion, it had been turned off to save money. The only illumination came from the large, nearly full moon behind swift-moving clouds.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he spotted Fiona’s distinctive silhouette at the mouth of the alley and called out her name. She turned toward him just as the moon slipped out from behind the clouds, pale silvery light glinting off the steel barrel of her pistol.