Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

Chapter 3

Though he wasn’t much for Paris, Gabriel was fond of the south of France and Nice was his favorite city in the country. Even under the present circumstances the sight of the countryside coming into view through the plane’s windows brought a smile to his face.

Charlie dropped him off at Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur and then flew the custom-built Bombardier Challenger CL-X to a hangar where it, and he, would stay until Gabriel needed them again. A man in his fifties, Charlie had been with the Foundation for years. Never said much; Gabriel had given up trying to engage the pilot in conversation long ago. But the man did his job well and took care of the plane as if it were his own, and what else did you need? Better to be in silent, safe hands than talkative, careless ones.

Gabriel made his way into the hilly, picturesque seaside town on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Lucy had taken an apartment near the port; as she’d once told him, she found flat horizons comforting. On a quiet evening like this, the sight of the Mediterranean receding into the distance would’ve given her all the comfort she wanted.

The sun was setting as Gabriel located Lucy’s building in the section known as Vieux Nice, which consisted of narrow, winding streets and old-town structures. The building was a crumbling, brick affair on a dimly lit lane near the water and the farmers’ market. It figured that Lucy would be living in a ramshackle place like this. She’d never had a taste for luxury. It was one of the things she’d spent her life rebelling against.

After checking to make sure there was no one around, Gabriel selected the thickest of a set of lock picks and used it to turn the heavy tumblers of the ground floor door lock. He replaced the pick inside the flat, leather money belt he wore beneath his shirt and let himself in. A set of creaking wooden stairs took him two flights up to the top floor. Number 303 was the door nearest the staircase. Gabriel reached for his picks again—but then he saw that the door was slightly ajar, the lock broken.

Moving slowly, he silently pushed the door open. The place was dark, heavy drapes drawn across the windows.

Except for one tiny spot of light moving on the other side of the room.

Gabriel felt along the wall beside the door and, when he found it, flicked the light switch.

A bare bulb went on overhead.

The first thing Gabriel noticed was that the apartment had been ransacked. Sofa cushions sporting deep slashes lay on the floor beside a pair of wooden desk drawers. Papers and debris littered the place.

The second thing he noticed was that the ransacking was still in progress. A woman with a penlight was standing by the desk, bent over its one remaining drawer. She looked up.

Gabriel shouted, “Hey!”

The woman quickly jumped away from the desk and darted through a doorway into the next room over. Gabriel leaped over the cushions in pursuit. The door to the other room slammed shut. Gabriel grabbed the knob—but as he did he heard the lock turn on the other side. He banged on the door with the side of his fist.

“Hey, open up! Who are you?” He repeated the question in French, adding, “I won’t hurt you!”

Silence.

Well, he thought, would you believe it if you were her?

Raising one leg, he brought the heel of his boot down on the metal knob. It took two blows before the knob smashed and the door swung open.

The bedroom beyond was empty.

Gabriel went straight for the adjoining bathroom. No one in there. He pulled back the shower curtain. Nothing. He returned to the bedroom and opened the clothes closet. Just clothing. He swept his hands through the outfits hanging from the rod. There was no one hiding between or behind them. He dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. Just dust. He then went to the room’s only window and opened the Venetian blinds. It was shut. There was a fire escape outside, but the window was locked from the inside. Unless she could move through solid walls, the woman couldn’t have gone that way.

What the hell . . . ? Where did she go?

Gabriel went back to the other room. She wasn’t there either. He skirted the mess on the floor and went into the small kitchen that was off to one side. He opened a cupboard and several pots and pans fell out.

He went back to the front door and looked out into the hall.

There had been a woman in the apartment, right?

He closed the door and surveyed the flat. There wasn’t any other place she could have gone. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. A coat closet by the door was open slightly. Gabriel yanked the doors the rest of the way and looked inside. She wasn’t in there either.

Bizarre.

He recalled the brief glimpse he’d gotten of the woman. She was young—probably around Lucy’s age, but it certainly wasn’t Lucy. Midtwenties, reddish hair down to her shoulders. About five-foot-seven. Wearing a black blouse and dark pants.

And very attractive. Nice figure, big blue eyes. Pouty mouth. It didn’t take more than a glimpse for those sorts of things to register with Gabriel.

Lucy, meanwhile, stood maybe five-two in heels (not that she ever wore heels), and if her weight had ever tipped over into the triple digits he’d have been amazed.

Who was this woman? What was she doing searching through Lucy’s things?

And how the hell had she gotten out of the apartment?

Just to make sure, Gabriel went through every room one more time. She wasn’t there. The woman had vanished into thin air.

He took stock of the situation. The place was a mess—but it wasn’t clear all the mess had been the handiwork of the woman he’d interrupted. Bits of electronic equipment were scattered all over the floor. A cheap flat-screen monitor lay facedown on the threadbare carpet. If they’d grabbed Lucy here, she wouldn’t have gone without a fight; what he was seeing might have been the result.

A print of Jacques-Louis David’s famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps hung over the desk. It had been slashed several times with something sharp. Gabriel moved closer to get a better look. Someone had also scrawled Arabic characters over one corner of the painting.

The Alliance of the Pharaohs? No way for Gabriel to know; he spoke only a few words of Arabic, mostly gutter slang he’d picked up on streets around the world, and he couldn’t read the language.

Michael, on the other hand, could.

Gabriel whipped out his thirty-thousand-dollar cell phone, fumbled till he found the button to activate the camera, and snapped a close-up of the line of Arabic script. Instants later, the image was winging its way wirelessly back to New York. Modern technology had its uses, much as he hated to admit it.

Next Gabriel examined the clutter around the desk. A laptop computer was spread open on the floor, its spine bending the wrong way. It looked as if someone had stomped on it with a heavy boot.

Then he noticed the dark spot on the floor near the sofa. Gabriel moved closer and crouched.

Dried blood.

Was it Lucy’s? Or had she wounded one of her assailants?

After canvassing the rest of the living room and kitchen, Gabriel returned to the bedroom. The double bed was unmade. A pair of pillows was on the floor and the sheets were in a torn heap. Bending to peer under the bed again, Gabriel spotted something on the far side. He got up, went around the bed, pushed it away from the wall and carefully lifted the object up.

It was half of a broken glass hypodermic syringe. The piece with the needle. There was some residue within the shattered barrel.

It either meant the kidnappers had used this on her or that Lucy had started shooting up for fun. Hell of a day when “your sister’s a junkie” is the better of your two options.

A sound from the hallway outside the apartment caught his attention. Gabriel heard heavy footsteps ascending the stairs. He rushed back to the front door and stepped out. Looking over the staircase rail, he could see all the way down to the ground floor.

Policemen. French policemen. Heading his way.

Gabriel looked around—he was already on the top floor, so there was no way out except down the stairs. He hurried back into the apartment, shut the front door as best he could, ran into the bedroom, and shut that door as best he could. Two broken locks meant two doors that wouldn’t keep the flics out for long. He went to the window, unlocked it and raised it, just as the police thundered into the living room. Gabriel swung a leg over the sill and stepped out onto the fire escape landing. Steps led down to the landings on successive floors and a narrow ladder attached to the exterior wall led upward, to the roof. Gabriel saw that two police vehicles were parked directly beneath him. Down was not an option.

He took the ladder two rungs at a time toward the roof. Just as he reached the top, he heard a shout from Lucy’s window. The police.

Gabriel climbed over the short wall that surrounded the roof and ran across the building. He reached the other side just as a uniformed officer appeared at the top of the ladder behind him.

“Arrêt!”

There was roughly a six-foot gap between Gabriel and the adjacent building. He backed up, took a running start, and jumped, landing squarely on the next roof. As he continued to run, Gabriel glanced back to see that two other policemen had joined the first.

They must have felt daunted by the space between the buildings—the policemen halted at the edge of Lucy’s roof. They shouted for him to stop but Gabriel kept going. He heard a gunshot go zipping past. He lunged for the edge of the building, grabbed hold of the top of the fire escape ladder, and hurled himself over the rim, landing on the narrow metal platform a few feet below. Beside him, a clothesline had been strung outside an apartment window and a variety of underwear hung from it: a man’s undershirt with stains at the collar and sleeves, a frilly underwire bra, several pairs of shorts. Next to the clothesline a thick, rubber-jacketed coaxial cable ran from a hole next to the window, across a wide alley, over a wooden fence, and into a yard containing what looked and sounded like a generator of some kind.

Gabriel snatched the bra from the clothesline and slung it over the cable. Holding onto one strap with each hand, he pushed off the landing. The cable dropped precariously under his weight, but it was well anchored and didn’t pull out of the wall. He slid down swiftly, dropping when he was a few feet above the ground, just before he would have slammed into the generator.

He took just a moment to catch his breath. The policemen couldn’t have seen him; they’d guess he’d gone down the fire escape and would be looking for him on the other side of the fence. For the time being, the safest thing for him to do was probably stay right here.

He thought so, anyway, until he heard a low, guttural growl behind him.

He turned his head to see two Doberman pinschers.

Staring at him. Baring their teeth.

Gabriel liked dogs well enough. He’d gotten along with plenty in his day, including some that hadn’t liked anyone else. He smiled at these two, held his hand out, palm up.

The dogs continued to growl.

Then one of them barked. It must have been a signal, for both animals lunged at him. Gabriel leapt to his feet and ran, followed by the dogs’ ferocious barking. He reached a tall tree on the far side of the yard, jumped, grabbed an overhanging branch, and pulled himself up just as a steel-trap jaw snapped at his legs. Gabriel continued to climb higher. One branch looked thick enough to support his weight and was long enough that its far end extended over the fence. He straddled the branch and crawled along it as the dogs barked and howled beneath him. The tree limb dipped as he crept toward its end. He could hear it beginning to creak. Gabriel kept moving. The dogs’ jaws were snapping just a few feet away. The limb made a sickening cracking noise—and finally snapped when he was just short of the fence. Gabriel fell but managed to catch hold of the top of the fence. He heard the dogs’ paws scrabbling in the dirt as they raced toward him, and then the sound stopped and he knew it meant they’d launched themselves through the air at him. With an enormous heave, he pulled himself over the fence, tumbling to the ground on the far side. Behind him, he heard the two dogs collide with the fence. They bayed with disappointment.

Gabriel bent to inspect his calf, to make sure he really hadn’t been bitten. He hadn’t felt a bite, but with the adrenaline coursing through him he wasn’t sure he would have. But no—there were no bite marks, just a broad smear of dirt along one leg. The impact of the fall on his hands and arms was beginning to make itself felt, though, and it hurt like hell, all the worse for coming on top of the strain of his recent caving adventure.

On the other side of the fence, the animals continued making a racket. Gabriel thought it best to get out of there before the noise told the cops exactly where he was.

But where exactly was he?

An alley. One direction looked like a dead end, but the other looked like it emptied onto a fairly busy street some thirty yards away. Gabriel hurried toward the open end. As he neared it, a shiny red Peugeot 4007 screeched to a stop in front of him, blocking his escape.

The passenger door opened.

“Hurry. Get in.”

The driver was a redhead in a low-cut black blouse displaying plenty of cleavage under a black leather jacket. Her lips weren’t pouty at the moment, but there was no question who he was looking at. The woman from Lucy’s apartment.

From somewhere behind the car came the sound of shouts, of running feet. Someone blew a whistle and, turning, Gabriel saw a policeman pointing a gloved finger in his direction.

“In or out?” the driver said, her French accent thick. “I am not remaining here.”

He jumped in and slammed the door shut. The woman pushed the pedal to the floor. With a squeal of burning rubber, the Peugeot merged recklessly into traffic. More whistles sounded behind them. The car shot through a red light and turned, barely missing a bus.

“Want to tell me who you are?” he said.

“Hush,” the woman said. “Allow me to concentrate.” She stared at the road intently, both hands gripping the wheel.

Gabriel heard a siren and glanced behind him. Sure enough, a police Renault was in pursuit, bubble lights flashing.

The woman made a sharp right turn into a one-way street—going the wrong way. Luckily, no other cars were in their path.

The Renault followed them. The woman shifted gears and sped faster down the street. As she reached the end, another vehicle started to turn into the lane, facing them. She leaned on the horn. The other driver panicked and drove off the road onto the sidewalk. The car hit a tree as the Peugeot zoomed past and out. She turned right and slipped into traffic with the police still hot on their tail.

They quickly came to a roundabout full of cars. The Peugeot spilled into the maelstrom, eliciting a cacophony of honking horns.

A taxi swerved in front of her, forcing the woman to pull the wheel sharply to the left, where a BMW in their way was moving much too slowly.

Gabriel braced himself with one hand against the dashboard.

But there was no collision.

He couldn’t have described what she’d done if his life had depended on it—and he supposed it had. Somehow she had maneuvered through the circling traffic and was now exiting the roundabout. The police car was stuck in an inner lane, forced to make another trip around.

He looked over at her. She hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Nice driving,” he said. He only knew one other woman—one other person, period—who could have pulled off a maneuver like that. “You’re not Brazilian by any chance?”

“What? No,” the woman said, and he could hear the dismay in her tone. “You cannot tell that I am French?”

“Just wondering,” Gabriel said, and sat back. Wherever she was taking him, he at least felt confident they wouldn’t crash getting there.

The woman headed down a side street and doused the headlights. Gabriel looked back to make sure they weren’t being followed. He saw nothing behind them but darkness. The woman made a sharp left into an alley, slowed down, and finally came to a stop.

“So,” she said. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a cigarette and a matchbook from an interior pocket.

Gabriel reached into his and pulled out his Colt .45. He pointed it at her.

“Now tell me who you are,” he said. “And this better be good.”