Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

GABRIEL HUNT

HUNT

Through the Cradle

of Fear

AS TOLD TO CHARLES ARDAI

LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

Gabriel put his shoulder to the rectangular block outlined by the recessed groove, braced himself and shoved.

The block rotated a few inches, as if on a central axis, then a few more when he shoved again. One more shove should do it—but Gabriel stepped back instead.

If he pushed it the rest of the way open, he might well find himself walking into an ambush. Whereas if he made them do it…

He pressed the end of his torch to the ground, stepping on it to extinguish the flame, then dropped it and took his Colt from its holster.

The room was perfectly, completely dark. And for a moment it was silent.

Then a crack of light appeared as he heard the sound of a shoulder ramming against the stone door from the other side. The crack widened into a wedge, and a moment later he saw Zuka charge through the opening holding a torch in one hand and brandishing a deadly looking curved sword in the other. Hanif came through the doorway behind him, his red fez tipped slightly forward, tassel soaring, mouth open in a bellow—and in his fist he held a short dagger with a silver blade, ready to plunge it down between Gabriel’s shoulder blades if only he could find them.

Gabriel raised his Colt. He aimed carefully at Zuka and squeezed the trigger…

Chapter 1

“Go,” Gabriel shouted, and he fired once more into the pack of men racing toward them. It was his last bullet and it found its mark, dropping a burly Magyar in a fringed vest before the man could take Gabriel’s head off with a two-handed swing of his sword. The curved blade fell from the man’s hand as he spun and collapsed; it slid along the stone floor until Gabriel stopped it with his foot. A scimitar, three feet from hilt to point if it was an inch, the steel tarnished but still deadly enough. Gabriel transferred his Colt to his left hand and scooped the sword up with his right. Unless they’d kept count, they didn’t know the gun was out of bullets, so keeping it in view might still do some good.

“Go,” he said again, shooting a glance over his shoulder toward the stone wall where Sheba crouched, clutching the shreds of her dress to her chest. “Now!”

“I can’t just leave you—”

“I’ll be right behind you.”

“There are too many for you to fight alone!”

There were. But having to keep an eye on Sheba didn’t make things any easier. Gabriel feinted with the sword, then smashed it broadside against the face of a squat, muscular man who’d stepped forward in an aikido stance. He planted a boot in the man’s midsection and shoved, toppling him backwards into one of his cohorts.

Gabriel took two rapid steps back, felt the stone of the low wall against his legs. Sheba was beside him. She’d made the mistake of glancing down and now looked terrified.

“Just grab hold and keep your eyes closed,” Gabriel said.

With trembling hands she reached up for the shuttle locked onto the metal cable overhead. The inch-wide metal strand descended at a steep angle from the turret above them to the treeline far below. She slid one wrist through each of the padded loops and took hold of the handgrips, releasing the lock. “Please,” she whispered, “be care—”

Gabriel shoved her off the wall. Her screams echoed as gravity pulled her down along the cable, loud at first, then quieter and quieter still. In the distance they heard branches crack and foliage cushion a fall.

He smiled at the two men in front of him and the three more behind them. “All right now, boys, no one else needs to die. She’s gone. You can’t bring her back.”

“On the contrary,” came a voice from behind the pack of men, and then Gabriel heard the uneven triplets of Lajos DeGroet’s step: slap, slap, click; slap, slap, click. The men parted to either side as the point of DeGroet’s iron walking stick appeared between them. “We can and we will. This is no more than a temporary setback.”

Gabriel leveled the Colt at DeGroet as the man limped forward. “You might as well put that away, Hunt, unless you plan to throw it at me. I know it’s empty.”

“How do you know that?” Gabriel said.

“Because you haven’t shot me with it yet.”

Gabriel considered that for a moment, then returned the gun to his holster, snapped it shut. He kept the scimitar raised and ready to strike—but he didn’t swing it. He had some skill with a blade, could even wield an unfamiliar one like this one with some hope of success, but only a fool would try to attack Lajos DeGroet with a sword. A suicidal fool.

“And how, Mr. Hunt, were you proposing to follow your young friend? I do not see a second shuttle on the line anywhere, and if you tried it bare-handed, your palms would be shredded within ten yards.”

Without looking behind him, Gabriel climbed up onto the wall, edged over to where the cable ran. His feet were steady, but he was conscious of being only one accidental step away from a three-hundred-foot plunge. The wind whipped teasingly at his clothes, as though eager to sweep him over the edge.

With his free hand, he unlatched his belt buckle and yanked the belt free. He slung it over the cable, caught the free end as it dropped toward his hand.

“I see,” DeGroet said. “Yes. Well. That might work, Mr. Hunt, I suppose, depending on what that belt of yours is made out of. But before you attempt it, you might want to look up.”

“Why?” Gabriel said, looking up. He saw a man run up to the edge of the turret, holding in each hand one arm of a gigantic pair of diagonal cutters. He positioned its open blades on either side of the cable.

“Akarja hogy most csináljam uram?” the man called, and DeGroet nodded. The blades came together with a snap like the closing of an alligator’s jaws. Gabriel let go of his belt just before the end of the cable came snaking past and whipped out into the distance. They could all hear it whistling as it fell and ringing each time it struck the rock face on the way down.

“Now,” DeGroet said, “you will put down that weapon and get off the wall and turn yourself over to Mr. Molnar’s custody.” A bald, round-faced man stared viciously at him and cracked the knuckles on one hand with his other. “I don’t promise that he’ll treat you gently; you did just kill his brother, after all. But I promise you’ll live. You’re no use to me dead.”

“What makes you think I’ll be useful to you alive?” Gabriel said.

“You really don’t have a choice, do you?” DeGroet said. He pointed to either side of him with his stick. The five men around him came in closer. Gabriel looked from man to man, from face to face. Molnar’s showed the fiercest emotion, but all of them looked as though they’d be glad to tear him limb from limb.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Lajos,” Gabriel said. “There’s always another choice.” He let the scimitar drop, turned, and hurled himself into space.

Chapter 2

“Wait a second,” Michael Hunt said, holding up a hand to halt the story of Gabriel’s escape from the castle in Hungary. “You jumped off the wall?”

Gabriel shrugged. He was leaning against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the second-story library of the Hunt Foundation building on Sutton Place. His younger brother’s desk was in one corner of the room with an elaborate computer setup on it and a fancy speakerphone the size of a dinner plate, and both pieces of equipment had lights blinking urgently, no doubt announcing the arrival of messages from all over the world, but Michael was ignoring them. “Explain that to me,” he said.

“I jumped,” Gabriel said. “Off the wall. What’s there to explain?”

“How you survived,” Michael said. “You didn’t have a parachute on under your jacket, did you?”

Gabriel shook his head. “Come on, Michael. A parachute? You’ve watched too many James Bond movies.”

“So then how…?”

“Please,” Gabriel said. “Do I ask you how you make your arrangements with museums and universities and what-have-you? To transfer objects from one to another, or whatever it is you do all day?”

“You could ask,” Michael said. “I’d be glad to tell you.”

“Well, I don’t. Professional courtesy. A man needs to have a trade secret or two.”

“But, Gabriel, a three-hundred-foot drop—”

“Yes, that is quite a lot, isn’t it?” Gabriel grinned. He knew it was driving Michael crazy and wasn’t about to let him off the hook a moment sooner than he had to.

“You said the castle overlooked Lake Balaton,” Michael said. “Is that it? You dropped three hundred feet into the lake, then swam away?”

“That would have been handy,” Gabriel said. “But no. The castle overlooks Lake Balaton from half a mile away. And before you ask, there was no donkey cart passing by at the foot of the mountain either, piled high with mattresses to cushion my fall.”

“Gabriel, please, you’re making a joke of it, and I’m quite serious. You know I don’t like your risking your life on these missions of yours—”

“I do, Michael. I do know that. I’m sorry.”

“Bad enough we lost Lucy,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

Lucy was their younger sister; she wasn’t dead, as far as either of them knew, but neither of them had seen her since she’d struck off for parts unknown at the age of seventeen amid the chaos surrounding what had happened to their parents. Today she’d be twenty-six.

“You won’t lose me,” Gabriel said.

“So, then, tell me,” Michael said, “how did you do it?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Gabriel said. “You can keep guessing, and if you guess right, I’ll tell you that you did. In the meantime,” he said, glancing at his dented Bulova A-11 wristwatch (and fingering the dent gently—it had stopped a bullet once), “I have an appointment with a young lady.”

“Sheba?”

“Who else?” Gabriel reached into his pocket and dropped a crumpled wad of receipts on Michael’s desk. “You can reach me on the cell phone—but I’d really prefer you didn’t. At least for an hour or two.”

Michael followed him out into the hall and down the curving grand staircase to the first floor. “Did someone fly underneath you, with a plane or a glider or something of that sort, and catch you as you fell?”

“That’s very creative,” Gabriel said. “Extremely creative. I’ll have to try that next time.”

Michael thought for a bit. Finally he said, “You had a second cable, attached to the side of the mountain lower down. One you could grab hold of as you fell past it. A backup in case the first one got cut. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Gabriel stretched out one hand, took hold of the back of Michael’s neck and pulled him forward, planted a kiss on the top of the younger man’s head, where his sandy blond hair was starting to thin. “You see, Michael? I’m always careful.”

“If you call betting on being able to catch a narrow filament of wire as you fall past it at thirty-two feet per second squared being careful!”

“I do,” Gabriel said, and shut the door behind him.

Walking west on 55th Street and then uptown on Park Avenue, Gabriel thought about his escape from Hungary—his and Sheba’s, since they’d ridden out together, first hidden briefly under blankets in the bed of a truck, then stashed in the crew quarters on the lower deck of a Romanian trawler on the Danube, and then finally darting onto a commercial flight back to the States just as the jetway was detaching from the plane’s fuselage.

As they’d taken their seats, Gabriel had seen, through the closing door, two pursuers come skidding to a halt at the ticket counter. They were pointing furiously toward the jetway and for a moment he’d worried they might succeed in holding the flight back. But the door had slammed shut and the plane had pulled away from the terminal on schedule, taxied down the runway, and lifted off without incident. They’d landed without incident, too, though Gabriel had kept his eyes out for trouble all the way back to Manhattan. After all, it wasn’t as though DeGroet’s men couldn’t find out exactly when and where they’d be landing.

Rather than bring Sheba back to the Hunt Foundation building, he’d stashed her in his rooms on the top floor of the Discoverers League, a century-old gentlemen’s club devoted to exploration, cartography, mountaineering, and similar pursuits. It was widely known that Gabriel was a member—Michael was, too, and the Foundation had supplied part of the League’s funding for years—but only a handful of people knew he kept an apartment there. It would hardly be fair to call it his home since Gabriel spent so little time there, but he didn’t have any other home in New York, try as Michael might to convince him to leave at least a toothbrush and some pajamas at the ancestral manse, and it seemed the safest place to keep Sheba hidden from prying eyes.

And whose eyes, exactly, might be prying? Well, DeGroet hadn’t given up—that much was clear. The real question was what he’d wanted with her in the first place. Gabriel had questioned Sheba in an attempt to figure this out, but she claimed to have no clue. They’d grabbed her out of the lobby of Goldsmith Hall in Dublin, chloroformed her when she’d fought them, and when she’d woken up she’d been in the cell in Hungary where Gabriel had found her. It was just good luck that Jim Kellen had seen it happen from his office window and had thought first to write down the license number of the van they’d bundled her into and then to phone Gabriel.

But what had DeGroet wanted? Sheba shrugged. He hadn’t said.

Had he asked her to do anything? No—nothing. He’d asked her a few questions about her thesis—but for heaven’s sake, Gabriel (Sheba had demanded, fists on her hips and outrage in her expression), did it really make sense to kidnap a girl if you wanted to ask her about her thesis? Christ’s sake, buy her a drink, you won’t be able to shut her up.

Gabriel turned onto East 70th Street and returned the wave he got from Hank, the elderly doorman who’d been manning the League’s front entrance since well before Gabriel had been born. Hank handed him a cardboard shipping box as he entered and Gabriel recognized his own handwriting on the label. It was the cost of flying commercial. They made you take off your shoes, stow your liquids, pass through metal detectors—no way they’d have let him on board with this baby. He worked a thumbnail through the packing tape as he waited for the League’s creaky two-person elevator to descend. An elevator hadn’t been part of the building’s original design and when the time came to add it later, in the 1920s, the only space they could use for it was a dumbwaiter shaft—which meant riding in a space originally meant for stacks of dishes.

He finally got through the tape as the indicator above the elevator door rotated from “3” to “2” and he removed a crumpled ball of packing paper from the box as it went from “2” to “1.” A bell pinged then and the door slid open.

Inside the narrow elevator, a man with a gun was holding Sheba with one arm around her throat and the other around her waist. She was struggling, wrenching against him. They both noticed Gabriel at the same time.

“Step back or she gets it,” the man said, angling his gun to point at the underside of Sheba’s chin.

Gabriel reached into the box, pulled out his Colt, thumbed back the hammer, and shot the man in the forehead.

Sheba screamed as the man’s grip first tightened, then slackened. He slumped backwards, though in the confined space there was no room for him to fall.

“Mr. Hunt,” Hank said, coming up from behind as fast as his ancient legs would carry him, “Mr. Hunt, is there trouble?”

“No, Hank. No trouble. Just need a mop.” The man’s blood had gone everywhere.

Hank looked inside the elevator. “Here, young lady, let’s get you out of there.” He directed an angry look Gabriel’s way. “Shootin’ up my elevator again. I thought I told you…”

“You did, Hank. You told me.” Gabriel took Sheba’s hand, led her out of the elevator. She was trembling. He could hardly blame her. “We’ll take the stairs, Hank.”

“You do that, Mr. Hunt. You take those stairs.” He headed off to the back, muttering something about what was he going to tell the police.

Gabriel led Sheba to the staircase.

“We should get out of here, Gabriel. They’ll come back. He’ll send more men.”

“You’re right,” he said, “but we need to clean you up first.”

“Clean…?” She reached a hand up to touch the back of her head and it came away sticky. Sticky and red.

“Come on,” he said. “Quick shower, it’ll come right out.”

“What do they want from me, Gabriel? Why are they after me?”

“We’re going to find that out.” He led her up the steps two at a time till they got to the fifth floor. The door to his suite was standing open and the entry foyer showed the signs of the fight Sheba had put up: a wooden stairstep cabinet knocked over onto the floor, dozens of its tiny drawers lying beside it, their contents spilled; a full-height wall mirror hanging at a crooked angle; the throw rug kicked into a tangle in the corner. Inside, Gabriel saw more destruction. His coffee table was listing, one of its legs having been neatly snapped off. Books were scattered across the floor.

“Well, at least you didn’t go quietly,” Gabriel said.

But Sheba wasn’t listening. She was already halfway to the bathroom, her coral blouse pulled open. She let it fall to the floor behind her and Gabriel left it lying there. The bloodstains wouldn’t come out, not from silk. She could find something else to wear in the closet.

“Did this guy say anything when he broke in?”

“Yeah,” Sheba said, unhooking her bra, stripping it off her shoulders and flinging it at Gabriel’s chest. “He said come quietly or I’ll blow your brains out.” Furiously, she stepped out of her slacks and turned to get the water running in the shower.

“Anything about where he was taking you?”

“He didn’t seem to feel the need to share that much information with me.” She stood facing him, thumbs hooked under the waistband of her panties, naked otherwise, blood smeared in the long cascade of her auburn hair, and Gabriel thought back to his conversation with Michael. He’d had hopes of getting Sheba out of her clothing, but this wasn’t the way he’d had in mind.

“Why don’t you take your shower, I’ll wait for you outside—”

“Like hell you will,” she said. “You and that gun of yours will stay right here with me.” She stripped off the last bit of clothing she had on and stepped under the steaming spray.

Minutes later, Sheba emerged dripping but no longer trembling, angry but no longer scared. She wrapped a towel turban-style around her head and made a beeline for the closet. Gabriel kept very little clothing for himself there, just a few linen shirts in various shades of cream and tan, a few pairs of khaki pants—items pretty much indistinguishable from the outfit he had on. But there was a good-sized selection of women’s clothes, things various guests had left behind optimistically after stays of a night or two. Sheba flipped through the hangers like a shopper at a sale, discarding one option after another. “Jesus, Gabriel, why are all your women so goddamn flatchested?”

“Only by your standards,” Gabriel said. He’d met Sheba’s family, and nature had been generous to all the McCoy women.

She found a dress, finally, a red satin number with a long slit up the side and no sleeves, but at least it fit when she pulled it down over her head. It had once held the ample charms of a woman named Cierra Almanzar; she’d left it here when she’d returned to her post as director of the Museum of the Americas in Mexico City. She wouldn’t mind sharing it with a fellow academic, Gabriel decided.

Gabriel strapped on a hip holster for his Colt, put a leather jacket on over it. He checked the gun’s cylinder—just two shots left. And naturally he didn’t have any more ammunition here in the apartment. Who would have thought he’d need any?

Sheba stepped back into the shoes she’d kicked off earlier, gaining three inches in the process, and Gabriel led her to the front door. They’d been in here barely ten minutes, but he knew she was right: for safety’s sake, they couldn’t leave soon enough.

He swung the door open.

Then he swung it shut again, spun, and, grabbing Sheba around the waist, took her down like a lineman making a tackle. They hit the floor an instant before the wood of the door splintered inwards and a cloud of shotgun pellets sped through the air inches above their heads.

Chapter 3

A second blast followed the first, tearing great gouts out of the wall opposite the door.

Gabriel put a finger to his lips, then gestured in the direction of the bedroom. Sheba nodded and began crawling that way on her hands and knees. Gabriel unholstered his Colt, armed it, waited one second…two seconds…three—and then popped up when he saw a shadow on the ruined surface of the door inch closer.

In a glimpse he saw the shotgun wielder, a big bear of a man in a black windbreaker, and behind him a pair of skinnier whippet types, hawk-nosed, their severe hair-lines shaved down to stubble. All three were holding handguns, though only the two in back had them pointed at Gabriel.

Gabriel fired twice and dodged away, not waiting to see who he’d hit. Return fire sounded loudly and bullet holes blossomed in the wall behind where Gabriel had been standing. A ricochet zinged into the mirror, which shattered, shards of glass pouring onto the floor with a sound like rain. This was the first bit of damage that really pissed Gabriel off—that mirror had been an antique. But there’d be time to mourn it later. If he was lucky.

The Colt was empty; he jammed it back in its holster and cast about for another weapon he could use.

Hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall was an aboriginal boomerang he’d been given by the chief of a tribe in New Guinea. Gabriel had learned to throw it while he was there, and if he were in one of the wide open spaces for which it had been designed he might have pulled off a slick maneuver, taking out multiple assailants with one flick of his wrist. But he was in a Manhattan apartment, where the best thing you could say for a boomerang was that it was a pretty good-sized stick. When he saw one of the gunmen’s hands come into view, pistol extended, Gabriel swung the boomerang down, smashing the man’s wrist. The gun fell to the ground and Gabriel kicked it out of sight under a couch.

The second of the two skinny gunmen elbowed his fellow aside and thrust his pistol in Gabriel’s face, but Gabriel caught it backhanded with an upswing of the boomerang as the man squeezed off a shot. The bullet flew over Gabriel’s shoulder, into a window, and out over 70th Street. Gabriel swung once more, striking the man in the temple with a blow that split the wooden boomerang in half. The man crumpled. But behind him the other gunman had recovered sufficiently to leap forward, the squat blade of a boot knife shining in his left hand.

Dropping the remnants of the boomerang, Gabriel threw up an arm to block a jab that would otherwise have given him an impromptu tracheotomy. Then he swung his other fist into the man’s gut. But the man didn’t fold up in pain; on the contrary, he took the punch without reacting at all, not surprising given the rockhard solidity of the abdomen that had met Gabriel’s knuckles.

Pressing with a forearm that had none of the showy bulk of a weightlifter’s but all the strength, the man forced his knife closer and closer to Gabriel’s face, millimeter by millimeter. With his free hand, Gabriel grabbed the man’s injured wrist. The man squealed in pain and Gabriel took the opportunity to lunge in and deliver a headbutt to his forehead.

If the man’s abdomen had been hard, that was nothing compared to his skull—Gabriel’s vision swam for a moment and his ears rang with the sound of the impact. But the strength went out of the other man’s arms, and he dropped to his knees amid the shards of the mirror. Gabriel lifted one of his own knees into the man’s chin and the guy slumped to one side, unconscious.

“Not so fast,” a voice said.

Gabriel looked up into the twin barrels of the shotgun.

“I reloaded it,” the man in the black windbreaker said, looking less like a bear now than a wolf, his eyes narrowed to slits, a vicious, hungry expression on his face. “In case you had the idea that maybe I hadn’t.”

Gabriel put his hands up, annoyed. Had his own shots hit no one at all?

“I always assume,” Gabriel said, “that any gun that’s pointed at me is loaded.”

“That’s smart,” the man said. “Now step back—over there by the couch will be fine.”

Gabriel stepped backwards toward the couch where he’d kicked the gun earlier. Looking over, he could just make out the shape of the barrel in the shadow by one leg. If the guy allowed him to sit down at that end—

An enormous clang sounded, like the ringing of a churchbell, and looking back Gabriel saw the man go down, shotgun and all. Sheba was standing above him with a newly dented brass coal scuttle clutched between her hands.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said.

“No problem,” Sheba said, tossing the scuttle aside. It clanged again when it landed. “I owed you one.”

“You owed me two,” Gabriel said, “but who’s counting. Come on.”

He led her back to the stairs. Before they made it one flight down, though, they heard a clatter of footsteps racing up toward them.

“Other way,” Gabriel said. They turned around and pounded back up, past the fifth floor, to the heavy metal door that led out onto the building’s roof. Even with the door shut behind them they could hear the footsteps and shouts of the men coming closer.

“Fire escape,” Gabriel said and pulled Sheba along.

At the edge of the roof they both leaned over the side, looked down at the topmost fire escape balcony some dozen feet below. Some old buildings in New York had metal ladders connecting the fire escape to the roof, but this wasn’t one of them. Some also had wide, modern fire escapes with protective railings to keep you from slipping off, but this wasn’t one of those either. The only way down from here was to climb over the edge of the roof, dangle, and let go—and if you slipped, you slipped five stories to the pavement.

“Oh, Jesus,” Sheba said. Her face had gone pale, much the same as it had in Hungary; sixty feet wasn’t three hundred, but a fall would be just as fatal. “Gabriel, I don’t know if I can—”

“Of course you can,” he said. “Here, I’ll lower you.” He wedged himself up against the stone wall at the edge of the roof and held tightly to her forearms as she carefully climbed onto the ledge. She extended one leg over the edge, then moved the other off, and as he suddenly found himself bearing her entire weight, Gabriel lost hold of one of her arms.

“Gabriel!”

“It’s okay, I’ve got you.” And he did, if only by one arm. He bent at the waist and carefully lowered her as far as he could. Her feet were still some distance from the platform. “Ready? I’m going to let go.”

“One second,” she said, and kicked off her heels again. One landed on the fire escape—the other slipped between the widely spaced metal laths and plummeted to the concrete below.

“Ready?” Gabriel said again.

“Wait—”

The door banged open behind him then, and Gabriel let go. He heard Sheba’s scream and a clatter as she landed, but he couldn’t spare a glance to see how she was doing. Not with three men pouring through the doorway onto the roof, three men who all matched Gabriel’s six-foot height but topped him in breadth and whose revolvers were probably not as lacking in bullets. That’s what he had to assume, anyway.

He quickly ran through some options in his head. There wasn’t any place he could run—it was a small roof. There wasn’t much for him to take shelter behind, just a single roof fan in a metal housing, and if he tried that they could split up and pin him down from both sides. Maybe if he could somehow make it past them to the stairs—

Gabriel turned and vaulted over the side of the building.

There was no second cable waiting for him this time. No first cable, for that matter. Just a narrow fire escape and a five-story drop.

For an instant, as he fell through the air, Gabriel found himself thinking about how much of his adult life he’d spent jumping from high places with people who wanted to kill him close behind. It was a topic, he decided, that might reward reflection sometime, when he could think about it at his leisure. But as his feet hit the fire escape and his legs buckled under him and he slid toward the edge, his mind was drawn sharply back to more pressing matters.

Scrabbling with one arm, he caught hold of the last of the laths just as he plunged over the side. He held on tight and found himself swinging from it in a great arc, back and forth, like a kid on a jungle gym. At the inner end of one swing he let go, dropping onto the next balcony down.

Glancing between the laths at his feet, he saw Sheba two flights below him, a shoe in one hand, descending as quickly as she could manage. Glancing up, he saw the men on the roof looking back down and then the barrels of their guns as they extended them toward him.

Three triggers were pulled simultaneously, and three bullets went spanging off various bits of metal between them and him.

Gabriel got his legs under him and, staying low, hurried down the metal steps. From overhead he heard the sound of first one, then another, of the men landing on the fire escape. The third attempted it but missed. A moment later he fell past Gabriel, arms windmilling desperately; their eyes locked for an instant and then he was gone. The sound when he hit the ground was wet and terrible.

Gabriel chanced another look down and was briefly concerned when he didn’t see Sheba below him. Then he realized it was because she’d already reached the bottom. He caught sight of her running along the sidewalk toward Park Avenue, both shoes in her hands now, bare feet pounding against the pavement.

Another bullet flew past him, this one within inches of his face. He saw Sheba stop and look back. “Go!” he shouted. “Don’t wait for me. Just go!”

She turned again—and ran head-on into the arms of a man who’d stepped around the corner into her path.

He was at least a foot taller than her and quite a bit heavier; despite the warm weather he wore a heavy overcoat and black leather gloves. And when she tried to back away, he wrapped his long arms around her and lifted her entirely off her feet.

The shoes fell from her hands.

Gabriel hurried to get to the bottom of the fire escape, but by the time he made it, leaping over the side of the lowest balcony and landing in a crouch, Sheba had already been bundled, screaming, into a black car that peeled away from the curb in a cloud of exhaust.

He ran after the car, chasing it out into the street as more gunshots exploded behind him. The car swung around the corner onto Park, where for once—this being a weekend morning in New York City in the middle of August—traffic was practically nonexistent. There’d be no catching it on foot. Gabriel looked back the other way, saw a yellow cab speeding downtown, and stepped into its path. The car screeched to a stop just inches from his legs.

The cabbie, a turbaned and bearded Sikh, stuck his head out the driver-side window and shouted, “You wish to be killed? Is this what you desire?”

Gabriel threw open the door to the backseat, piled inside. “You see that car,” he said to the driver in Punjabi, “the black one, there? Follow it. Don’t let it out of your sight. A woman’s life depends on it.”

Through the rear window, Gabriel saw the men from the roof round the corner. One of them kicked Sheba’s shoes into the gutter as he ran. The other raised his gun.

“Now!” Gabriel said, ducking.

The cabbie glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the rear windshield of his car shatter. He put the gas pedal to the floor and, swerving around a double-parked delivery van, roared off.

Chapter 4

They made it three blocks before a sedan pulled in behind them, a silver Audi with smoked-glass windows and a dent the size of a melon in the hood. The four silver circles across the car’s grill made Gabriel think of the ring in the nose of a bull, particularly when the driver revved the engine angrily and the car surged forward. The Audi came within a few feet of the cab’s rear bumper before the taxi driver—Rajiv Narindra, according to the ID displayed on the back of his seat—swerved again, nearly sideswiping a street-corner hotdog cart in his haste to change lanes.

Above the next intersection, the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Narindra sped through it. It turned red before the Audi reached it, but they sped through as well. A chorus of honking erupted behind them.

“Who are these men?” Narindra shouted back at Gabriel.

“They are hired killers, abductors,” Gabriel said, testing the limits of his Punjabi vocabulary. “They have taken a friend of mine and…mean to…” Damn it, what was the word? “Harm her.”

“Why?”

“If I could tell you that,” Gabriel muttered, in English this time, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He bent forward over the front seat, thankful to have gotten into one of the minority of cabs in New York that didn’t have a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers. He rifled through the pile of odds and ends cluttering the passenger seat: a thick, spiral-bound book of maps, a handful of ballpoint pens, half a sandwich, an unopened bottle of Snapple. Narindra turned the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Gabriel against his shoulder, and then swung it back to the right.

“Do you have anything we could use as…” Gabriel’s language skills petered out again. Desperately he resorted to English. “A weapon—a gun…a, a, a jack, something heavy—anything you could use as a weapon?”

Narindra shook his head. “A weapon? This I do not have.”

Up ahead, Gabriel saw the black car speeding up, pulling away. A glance at their own speedometer showed they were doing close to fifty themselves.

From behind, meanwhile, came the crack-crack-crack of gunfire. Narindra cut across two lanes and then back.

Beggars can’t be choosers. Gabriel grabbed the Snapple bottle and, turning in one swift movement, cocked his arm and launched the bottle through the open space where the rear windshield had been. The driver of the Audi pulled to one side to avoid it, but the bottle struck, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the glass.

That was something—but hardly enough. And now he was out of projectiles completely.

An arm holding a gun emerged from the Audi’s passenger-side window and fire erupted from the barrel. Gabriel dropped to his knees in the cab’s footwell. A line of bullet holes stitched across the back of the front seat, throwing puffs of padding into the air. That it was only shreds of foam rubber raining down on him and not blood was just dumb luck, Gabriel knew—two feet to the left and he’d have been hurtling down Park Avenue in a cab with a corpse at the wheel.

He peeked over the front seat again, looked at the dashboard. There had to be something—

The meter.

Mounted on a metal bar, tallying up his fare in 40-cent increments, a curl of cash register tape trailing from the receipt slot at the top—it was a compact unit but looked heavy, the perfect combination. It also looked firmly attached, but what had once been mounted had to be removable. It would be easier with the proper tools, of course, but—

Gabriel lunged forward, took hold of the meter with one hand on either side, and wrenched it violently.

“What are you doing?” Narindra cried. “I am responsible for that!”

“I’ll—” Gabriel wrenched at it again. “I’ll pay—” One more time. Come on. “I’ll pay for it,” he shouted, pulling and twisting till with a snap of breaking plastic and metal the unit came free. It made a sad little grinding noise as it lost power. “And the windshield,” Gabriel said breathlessly. “I’ll cover it all, just keep driving.”

“Crazy, you are crazy,” Narindra said, and Gabriel didn’t bother to argue. Instead, he turned back, crawled halfway out onto the trunk of the cab and, anchoring his feet against the back of the rear seat, rose up on his knees, hefted the taxi meter in both hands, took aim, and hurled it directly at the Audi’s windshield.

A direct hit would smash the glass this time—it was already cracked. And whatever smashed the glass would continue on through the glass into the driver’s face at a relative velocity of somewhere north of fifty miles per hour. Realizing this, the driver pulled the wheel violently to the right, and this time he succeeded in avoiding the missile, though only by inches. What he didn’t succeed in avoiding was the curb, which vanished under his right front tire as the Audi leapt onto the sidewalk; or the fire hydrant by the curb, which crumpled the front of the car like it was made of tinfoil. The driver and his passenger were both hurled forward and would have collided painfully—maybe fatally—with the steering wheel in one case and the windshield in the other, had it not been for the car’s airbags, which deployed with showroom precision.

Safe cars, Audis.

Gabriel carefully crawled backwards, ducking back into the cab and collapsing in the backseat. He saw Narindra eyeing him in the mirror.

This was the moment of truth—would he stop the car and insist that Gabriel get out, which in practice would mean losing the other car, and Sheba, possibly permanently? Or would Narindra keep going, to help save a young woman’s life?

“You say you will pay?” Narindra said.

“Anything,” Gabriel said. “Name your price.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Five thousand,” Gabriel said.

“You are crazy,” Narindra said. But he kept driving.

The black car was half a mile ahead by then, but they made up some distance when it turned crosstown and began plowing through the slightly denser traffic on the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. They reached the tunnel entrance just a few hundred yards behind the other car and spotted it again the instant they emerged.

They were on the highway now, barreling through the wilds of northern New Jersey, and could really put on some speed, but at Gabriel’s request Narindra hung back, leaving several car lengths and at least one lane between them and the black car at all times. From the rear they presented an unusual sight, with the missing windshield and the trunk riddled with bullet holes, but from the front there was nothing out of the ordinary—just a New York cab taking someone on a short hop outside the city—and Gabriel was counting on their being able to go unnoticed, as long as they didn’t get too close.

It was the only choice. Gabriel couldn’t see trying to run the other car off the road or bring them to a stop in some other way, not with Sheba’s life at stake and Narindra at risk, too—especially not when the occupants of the other car were almost certainly better armed than he was. The thing to do was to find out where they were taking her; he could regroup then, return with the proper equipment and help, maybe even involve the police. Or maybe he’d mount a solo rescue the way he had in Hungary. There were all sorts of options. But first he needed to know where they were planning to stash her.

It was with a sinking feeling that Gabriel saw the airfields and hangars of Teterboro Airport loom at the horizon.

Narindra said, “They seem to be headed for the—”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, “I see it.”

Stashing didn’t look like it was in the cards.

He fingered the cell phone in his pocket. He hated the things, but even he had to concede there were times when they were indispensable. He speed-dialed Michael’s number and, while it rang, dug a handful of hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket. He passed three to Narindra across the tattered back of the front seat. “A down payment,” he said. Then, to Michael: “Two things, Michael, and I don’t have much time to talk. First: I need you to take care of someone for me…a cab driver, his name is Rajiv Narindra, he’ll be calling you…five thousand dollars…he can tell you that himself. Just make sure he gets what he needs—it’s got to be enough to repair his taxi plus some extra. That’s right, on the Foundation’s tab.” Gabriel paused while Michael peppered him with questions, most of which he couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to and the remainder of which he didn’t want to. When his brother fell silent again, Gabriel said, “Second thing: I may not be home for a little while. I’ve got a feeling there’s some plane travel in my future.”

Michael’s tinny voice sounded weary through the phone’s speaker. “When has there ever not been?”

“Well, this is a little different than usual. I don’t have a ticket, I don’t have a passport, and I don’t know where I’m headed.”

“Getting away from it all?”

“I wish,” Gabriel said. “Now, listen. I’m going to leave my phone turned on and I want you to track it—to track me. You understand? I may need your help when I get wherever it is that I’m going.”

“My help?” Michael sounded anxious suddenly. He was only thirty-two, six years younger than Gabriel, but he worried like an old man. “What’s going on, Gabriel? Are you in trouble?”

“We’ll see,” Gabriel said. “Maybe not. But just in case, I want you to know where I am.”

Michael didn’t say anything for a bit. “You’re stringing a second cable here, aren’t you? In case the first one gets cut.”

“So to speak,” Gabriel said.

“All right. Consider yourself tracked. But, Gabriel—your cell battery won’t last forever. You know how plane travel drains it. If the flight’s more than ten hours…”

“Then let’s hope it isn’t,” Gabriel said, and ended the call before Michael could protest further. Up ahead, the black car had just driven off the main highway onto an unlabeled side road. Gabriel returned the phone to his jacket pocket. He didn’t turn it off.

They drove past the road the black car had used. Teterboro catered to private jets and chartered flights, with accommodations of varying degrees of exclusivity. Ordinary businessmen drove in through the main entrance and underwent a check-in process similar to what they’d have gone through at LaGuardia or JFK; the wealthier sort drove on unlabeled roads up to private hangars and took off without once getting patted down or wanded or asked for I.D. They could carry all the Colts on board they wanted.

Narindra pulled the cab to a stop in a small cul-de-sac that was screened from view by a thick copse of trees. Gabriel got out and, using one of the pens from the front seat, dashed off Michael’s private office number on a scrap torn from the sandwich wrapper. Then he shook Narindra’s hand.

“Michael will take care of you,” Gabriel said. “I promise.”

Narindra said nothing. He was looking over the wreckage of his taxi.

“These men,” he said finally, “who kidnapped this friend of yours, this woman. Who shot up my car. You will see they get what they deserve, yes?”

“I’ll do my best,” Gabriel said.

On the far side of the trees a fence with coils of barbed wire at the top bore a sign warning that trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Gabriel pulled the sign off, carried it under his chin as he scaled the fence, and used it to press the strands of barbed wire out of his way. Once he’d bent enough strands down to make room, he climbed over the top and down the other side.

There were no more trees here, but there was plenty of underbrush, none of it recently trimmed, and by moving in a low crouch Gabriel was able to keep out of sight. The first hangar he passed was, as you might expect on a Sunday morning, empty, and the second seemed occupied only by a mechanic who was up to his elbows in a disassembled engine. But the third hangar was bustling. Two trucks and several cars were parked outside, including the one he’d followed here from New York. The black car’s door opened as he watched. The big man came out first, walking backwards, and Sheba came with him, still clutched in his arms, her kicking feet swinging some distance off the ground. “Let me go!” she shouted, and Gabriel ached to race forward and make him do just that, pull the big ape’s paws off her, teach him a school-yard lesson about picking on someone his size. But there were too many other people around, easily a dozen or more, most of them this guy’s size or close to it, and most wearing holsters on their hips or under their arms. Some were unloading long, low crates from the back of a truck, others were wheeling the crates over to the hangar building. Gabriel might have been able to take any one of them, maybe two—but all at once? With nothing but his bare hands? There was bravery and then there was idiocy.

But he had to do something. He watched Sheba’s captor carry her into the hangar, and through the open bay doors Gabriel saw him drag her up the rear ramp of a cargo plane—the same place all the crates were being loaded. He tried to get a glimpse of the plane’s registration, but no luck—there were numbers on the tail, but nothing to indicate what country it might have come from or been heading to.

He crept closer, keeping the body of the larger of the two trucks between him and the workers still busily unloading and moving the cargo. Through the hangar doors, he heard a pair of voices in conversation, one nasal and high-pitched, the other a lifelong smoker’s rasp. Both had an accent, one he’d heard plenty of in recent weeks.

“You did well, Andras,” the smoker said, pronouncing the name the Hungarian way, with a soft “s”: AHN-drahsh. “Mr. DeGroet will be pleased to get her back.”

“Someone should cut the bitch’s nails,” Andras said. His was the nasal whine. “You see this? You see what she did to me?”

“Poor baby,” the smoker said. “A scratch.”

“It’s three scratches, and you wouldn’t find it so funny if it was your face. She nearly took my eye out.”

“What do you want for it, Andras, some iodine? Or maybe hazard pay?”

Andras grumbled. “And why not hazard pay? That’s not a bad idea.”

“Well, then,” the smoker said, “you go ahead and bring it up with Mr. DeGroet when we land, why don’t you? He’ll probably be glad to entertain your request.”

“He should be,” Andras said.

“But do be prepared,” the smoker said, “if I am incorrect and he is not glad—if, say, he is in a bad mood because his plans have been delayed this long—in that case you realize he will kill you just for suggesting such a thing. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Ah, go to hell,” Andras said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Maybe he’ll use you for practice, the way he did with Janos. Cut you to ribbons. With his saber, perhaps. It has always been his favorite.”

Andras said nothing.

“Or,” the smoker continued, “you could take the pay you were promised, go buy yourself a bottle and a girl, and keep your goddamn mouth shut. Mind you, it’s up to you which you do—I’m just saying you could do that. It’s your choice.”

“You’re a real bastard, Karoly, you know that?”

“Oh, yes,” Karoly said. “I know that—and as long as you don’t forget it, we’ll get along fine.”

Gabriel moved away from the wall of the hangar, where he’d been standing, his ear pressed to the metal. They were taking her back to DeGroet—back to Hungary, presumably, though probably not to the castle, not now that Gabriel had infiltrated it once. Hungary wasn’t a big country, relatively speaking, but it was big enough that one woman could quite easily be made to vanish. There was only one way to be sure that couldn’t happen—and that was to stay with her. But how…?

He waited until the crew working on unloading the truck wheeled the next crate down the short metal ramp in back. There was one man still inside, Gabriel saw, seated on a folding chair; behind the wheel, in the truck’s cab, there’d been one more. But that was all—temporarily the other men were all engaged in steering the bulky crates over to the hangar and onto the plane. That evened up the odds a bit, at least.

Gabriel walked casually up the ramp, gave a two-fingered wave to the seated man. There was only one crate left inside the truck. It was made of black plastic like the others he’d seen, with metal latches to keep the top down; the thing was at least six feet long and maybe two-and-a-half feet wide. It looked a little like a plastic coffin on wheels.

“Who are you?” the man said. He was paunchy and seemed to be thoroughly winded even though the extent of his physical labor appeared to have involved checking off items on a clipboard.

“I’m on Mr. DeGroet’s personal staff,” Gabriel said. “He wanted me to oversee this particular…” he waved at the crate “…container.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your name?”

“Gabor,” Gabriel said. “Gabor Nagy.” It was the most common Hungarian surname he could think of; it meant “big.”

The man flipped through a couple of pages on his clipboard and didn’t find any Nagy listed. “You’re not on here.”

“I should be—he’d be mad as hell if he found out I wasn’t. Let me see.” He came up beside the man, who didn’t bother standing, just held the clipboard out. “I’m right there,” Gabriel said, pointing, and when the man took the clipboard back to peer at the page, Gabriel clocked him with a solid right cross. The man went down like a felled log.

Gabriel glanced outside. There was still no one in view, thankfully. With one hand under each armpit, he dragged the man down the ramp and around to the side of the truck. Once there, he rolled the man underneath, making sure to shove him far enough that he couldn’t be seen. They’d find him there eventually, or he’d come to on his own; they were unlikely to drive over him. Just in case, though, Gabriel left him between the truck’s wheels rather than in their path.

Then he went back up the ramp and unlatched the crate. It wasn’t full. Inside, under a folded-up blanket being used for padding, were two wooden racks of rifles and, below them, box after cardboard box of ammunition.

Guns and ammo. For what? What private army was DeGroet equipping? His own, presumably—but to what end?

There was no time for speculation: from outside Gabriel could hear the steps of the men returning, still distant for now but getting louder.

He lifted the gun racks out, wrapped the blanket loosely around them, and laid them down where the man had been sitting. He set the folding chair on top for good measure. He then climbed into the crate. It was a tight fit—but it was a fit. He lowered the cover gently and heard the latches catch. Would he be able to open them again from the inside? He thought so. A swift kick should do it. If not, maybe he could blast the latches open—with the vast selection of cartridges he was lying on he figured he could probably find some .45 caliber rounds that would fit his Colt. Not that he relished the prospect of firing a gun in an enclosed container full of black powder.

Pressing up gently against the underside of the crate’s lid with his palms opened the seal a crack, enough to let in a bit of air and a thread of light. The light was interrupted after a moment as two men climbed into the truck. One pair of legs sported khaki workpants, the other denim. Gabriel heard one of the men calling for someone named Stephen. Stephen didn’t answer, presumably because he was otherwise occupied under the truck. A quiet conversation in Hungarian ensued. The men were trying to decide what to do. Wait for Stephen to return from taking a leak or having a smoke or whatever he’d decided he had to do right this moment? Or just take the last crate and the hell with him?

They seemed to settle on “the hell with him” since Gabriel’s view was cut off as the men stepped closer and then he could feel the crate being rolled down the ramp.

They rolled him across level ground for a minute and then up another ramp—longer, steeper—and shoved him against a bulkhead. Raising the cover again, Gabriel saw that the crate was conveniently facing a window, so that even if the activation of the plane’s deafening jet engines minutes later hadn’t been enough of a clue, the view of the land dropping out of sight would have told him they were on their way.

Gabriel did his best to get comfortable in the cramped space. He took his phone from his pocket and glanced at the display. New York to Hungary was a nine-hour flight with good tailwinds.

As he watched, the battery portion of the phone’s readout silently dropped from four bars to three.

Chapter 5

Gabriel hadn’t intended to sleep, but he found himself waking with a start as the plane’s landing gear touched down. They skipped once, twice, then settled on the tarmac, the big plane’s momentum carrying them forward along the runway as the power to the engines cut out. Gabriel chanced a peek outside through the seam, but the window was dark—and so, when he tried it, was his phone. He pressed all the buttons. Nothing.

Had something kept them in the air longer than expected? Or had they landed somewhere farther away than Budapest?

Which led to the next question: For how long had Michael been able to track his location? Maybe only halfway there, maybe up until the moment before he tried his phone. There was no way to know.

Gabriel heard the sound of seat belts unbuckling, heavy footsteps moving around the cabin. He did not hear any lighter steps he could identify as Sheba’s, and he didn’t hear her voice, but that didn’t mean anything—Andras could be carrying her, bound and gagged, or maybe she was being held in another part of the plane. They wouldn’t have hurt her or killed her, he was confident of that; not as long as DeGroet wanted her for some purpose of his own.

Gabriel groped around beneath him, felt the cardboard boxes of varying sizes, slipped his fingers under one flap after another. He couldn’t see a thing, of course, and though he had the Zippo lighter with him that he always carried, he could hardly light it here—even if the sudden appearance of a glow from inside the crate wouldn’t give him away, the explosion it could easily set off would make the whole thing moot. But he’d handled enough guns in his day to be able to tell by feel a rifle cartridge from one for a semiautomatic pistol, a .32 from a .45. Telling a .44 Remington from a .45 Winchester was a bit harder, but not impossible. He ran the selection he found between his fingertips, comparing length and grooving. Wrong caliber was not so much of a worry—a cartridge too wide wouldn’t chamber and one too narrow would announce the fact by the too-roomy fit. Too long, same thing. But slightly too short would be easy to miss, and could lead to a shot that either didn’t go off when the time came or went off in a spectacularly bad way. So care was called for, and he exercised as much as he reasonably could, lying in the dark in a crate in the belly of a plane in the middle of god-only-knew-where.

He finished loading the cylinder just as the crate next to his was loudly pushed aside, smacking into the inner wall of the plane’s hull with a jolt that made Gabriel hope it contained something less explosive than the one he was in. His was the next to move, and he lay still when it did, not wanting to draw any attention.

Once they were down the ramp, Gabriel gently raised the cover of the crate again, hoping for some glimpse that would tell him where they were, but beyond a blinding ring of magnesium vapor lights he could see nothing at all, just solid black. It was nighttime wherever they were, and except in your major cities, nighttime tended to look much the same from place to place—especially when you could only see a sliver of it.

Then a streak of red satin passed in front of him. He craned his neck to keep it in view as long as he could, but it was gone in an instant, followed close behind by the rougher folds of a long overcoat. “Keep moving,” came Andras’ voice, though whether he was talking to Sheba or the men loading the crates, Gabriel couldn’t guess. In any event, both kept moving, and within minutes all the crates were on trucks and tearing along a road that seemed paved but just barely so—Gabriel felt every pit and gully in the surface as they passed over it.

But at least they were on their way. Gabriel settled back for the ride.

They unloaded him, along with the other crates, a bit more than an hour later—Gabriel’s cellphone may have died and its clock with it, but the luminous dial of his wristwatch, made in 1945 and only repaired once since, was still giving off its pale glow. Sometimes, he thought, the old technologies were better.

The texture of the ground under the wheels of his crate changed after a minute, from solid to…something less than solid, almost as though they’d left pavement for dirt, or not even dirt—it seemed looser, somehow. And the sound was different as they passed over it.

After a time, they came to a stop. All around him, Gabriel heard men walking rapidly, but barely any conversation, only the occasional order issued in a low bark. His crate was jostled once by another and then shifted to a new location a few yards away. A peek outside showed more crates around him, some stacked two or three high—he at least could be grateful that so far nothing had been stacked on top of his.

A car pulled up then, not in his sight, but in his hearing. The door opened and slammed shut, and a new set of footsteps approached. A set with three beats to it rather than two: slap, slap, click; slap, slap, click. Gabriel tensed at the sound.

“Well, well,” Lajos DeGroet’s voice came, from perhaps twenty feet away. “Well, well, well. My dear girl. So good to see you again.”

“Who the hell do you think you are,” Sheba said, sounding far more measured and reasonable than Gabriel thought he would in her place, “that you can kidnap a woman off the streets of New York City, fly her halfway around the world, and, and…”

“That’s all right, my dear. Let it out. You are angry and I don’t blame you.”

“You don’t blame me? You don’t blame me?”

“No, don’t hold her back,” DeGroet said, apparently to one of his men, perhaps Andras, “let her go. She won’t attack me. She knows better than that.” Gabriel heard a click followed by the sound of metal sliding against metal, and he knew DeGroet had turned the grip of his iron walking stick and drawn from within the modified fencing saber it hid. “Don’t you, my dear?”

Lajos DeGroet, son of a Dutch father and a Hungarian mother, both from artistocratic families with wealth and property to burn, had led the unproductive life his parentage entitled him to—with one exception. In his youth he’d gravitated toward the sport of fencing and at age twenty he’d competed for Hungary in the summer Olympics in Rome. He’d won a silver medal that year but famously refused to accept it; four years later, after intensive training under the great Hungarian fencing master Rudolf Kárpáti, himself a six-time gold medalist, DeGroet had returned from Tokyo with a gold.

After that, DeGroet had largely vanished from the public eye, returning to his family’s customary pastimes of accumulating and squandering money in spectacular but private fashion. Gabriel had crossed paths with him more than once, since the man was an inveterate collector—the acquisitive sort who can’t stop raising his paddle at an auction and, because of the resources at his command, never has to. Which was fine if you were on the selling end of a transaction, as Gabriel had been more than once—there’d been the gilt ceremonial bowl from Myanmar and the skull fragment from central Africa. But if you were competing with DeGroet to buy something, you might as well pack up and go home, and Gabriel had discovered that as well. The trust that underlaid the Hunt Foundation was considerable, containing as it did all the many millions of dollars his parents’ bestselling books had brought in over the years (a rich enough haul during their lives, but an absolute flood after their disappearance at sea in 2000 landed them on the front page of every newspaper in the world)—but there were fortunes and there were fortunes, and Gabriel could have bankrupted the Hunt family fortune twice over without making a dent in DeGroet’s.

So: a collector, of gold medals and golden artifacts and gold itself, no doubt, as well as all the other forms in which wealth could be stored or expressed; also a fencer, one of the best Hungary had ever fielded, which was another way of saying one of the best the world had ever seen; and though the man was nearing seventy now and had lost some height and some hair over the years, he’d lost not a bit of his old quickness or his skill with a blade. Or his arrogance, or his bad temper. He didn’t walk with a stick because, being old, he needed help with his balance. He did it to ensure he could always keep a sword close at hand.

“Now, my dear,” DeGroet said, in a voice whose attempt at sounding friendly was as unctuous as it was unconvincing, “as I had been about to tell you when your meddlesome friend insisted on seizing you from my care back at Balaton, I am a great admirer of your work. I have read all your papers. Your work on the iconography of the ancient world is not just accomplished, in my opinion it is groundbreaking.”

“You didn’t bring me here at gunpoint,” Sheba said, through what sounded like clenched teeth, “to compliment my scholarship.”

“On the contrary. That is precisely what I did. Andras, please, show her over here.” There was a brief flurry of footsteps and the voices, when they resumed, were further away. Gabriel thought this might be a good time to get out of the crate and quietly pressed upward with his knees until the latches popped. He climbed over the side, dropped lightly to the ground, looked around. But he was hemmed in by crates on all sides, so he couldn’t see a thing.

“…you see, Miss McCoy,” DeGroet was saying, “I have need of someone with your particular expertise. Some light, please, Andras. No, here.” A faint orange glow lightened a portion of the dark sky in the direction the voices were coming from. “Can you read that, my dear?”

“I don’t need to read it,” Sheba said. “I know what it says.”

“How foolish of me, of course you do. But just to humor me, could you perhaps tell us what it says.”

“It’s the story of the prince’s dream,” Sheba said. “How he came here and fell asleep at noon, with the sun overhead, and a voice spoke to him from heaven saying, ‘I am your father and you are my son, I shall give you dominion over the land and all those who live within its borders, if you shall honor me and do my bidding.’ Roughly speaking.”

“Very good,” DeGroet said. “But there is a specific instruction you omitted.”

“What? The bit about unburying him?”

“Yes,” DeGroet said. “That bit.”

“‘The sands in which I lie have covered me. Swear to me that you will do what I ask of you, my son, that I may know you as my source of help, and I may be joined with you in eternal sovereignty.’”

“‘The sands in which I lie,’” DeGroet repeated. “The young prince had the best of intentions, but he never did manage to fulfill his promise. It took three millennia to do the job—longer, nearly three and a half. And then they stopped, because they thought they were done. The fools.”

“What are you talking about?” Sheba said, and where he was crouching among the crates Gabriel thought the same thing. Three millennia? The Hungarian countryside boasted any number of ruins dating back to the time of the Romans, but those were only two thousand years old, not three or four thousand. There was nothing in the country that old.

And sands? Hungary was landlocked, for heaven’s sake.

Where the hell were they?

Gabriel glanced around, peered between the crates, saw no one facing in his direction. Reaching back into the crate he’d just exited, he dug under the boxes of ammunition till he uncovered the long barrel of a rifle—he’d felt it beneath him on the plane, but couldn’t get at it while he was lying on top of it. Now he set it down on the ground, loaded it, and slung a bandolier of extra rifle shells over his head. Just in case the bullets he’d slipped into his Colt didn’t fire after all. Or, hell, even if they did. DeGroet had at least a dozen men here, maybe more—it was impossible for Gabriel to be too heavily armed.

Gripping the rifle under one arm and unholstering the Colt, Gabriel crept cautiously out of his little enclosure and into the shadow of the truck that had brought him. Then he stood up for the first time in twelve hours. Once the pins and needles in his legs had subsided, he leaned around the rear corner of the truck to get his first good look at where he was—and his jaw fell open.

Chapter 6

It was the dead of night, two hours before the dawn, and except for the movement of DeGroet’s men, the Plateau of Giza was silent, still. In the distance, the Great Pyramid—Egypt’s towering mausoleum for the Pharaoh Khufu, the last surviving Wonder of the Ancient World—loomed darkly against the deeper black of the sky. Around it, the smaller pyramids built to house Khufu’s wives and mother, and farther out the ones for Khafre and Menkaure, his successors, gave the plain a jagged skyline, like a giant jaw full of pointed teeth. The men, by comparison, looked tiny, insignificant, lost.

Immediately before them, facing them in its eternal crouch, blanketing them with its moon-cast shadow, was the Great Sphinx.

DeGroet and Sheba stood between the lion’s paws, Andras shining his flashlight’s paltry beam at the stone stele erected there by Thutmose IV. Other men bustled about, Hungarians in western clothing mixing with locals whose garb ranged from turban to fez to coarse burnoose, wrapped tight against the late-night desert chill. Camels stood beside cars, shivering and ducking their heads to nose at the sand. Tilting his own head back to look up, Gabriel saw the great beast towering above them all, its sculpted head as high in the air as the roof of the Discoverers League building back in New York, its shoulders as broad as the building’s facade, and its torso stretching into the distance behind it for the better part of a football field’s length.

Its body, though eroded by thousands of years of exposure both to the elements and to mistreatment by men, still showed the muscular form of a prone lion, facing east to greet the rising sun as it ascended above the Nile. It had lain like that since before the pyramids themselves all were built. Two thousand years before the birth of Alexander the Great, one thousand years before the birth of Moses, the Sphinx had already been meeting each sunrise with its majestic stare for a century or more. Today the stare emerged from the face of a pharaoh, framed on either side by the traditional Egyptian headdress of state, his stone lips cracked and ruined, the better part of his great carved nose shattered off. But this pharaonic head looked strangely small compared to the size of the body and it was commonly thought that the statue had originally borne the head as well as the body of a lion—that it had begun its existence as a monumental statue of a cat, symbol of the sun god, and that only later, under the guidance of a despot mad with vanity, had the feline head been recarved into a man’s, making what had once been a gorgeous animal into a hybrid, a monster.

The Egyptians hadn’t called the monster “sphinx”—it had been the Greeks who’d given it this name when eventually they’d landed from across the northern seas, recognizing in its hybrid shape a resemblance to a local legend of their own, of a woman with a lion’s torso, an eagle’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. The word meant “strangler” or “one who chokes” in Greek, a reminder of how the Greek sphinx killed unlucky travelers who failed to answer her famous riddle. But the Great Sphinx of Giza had no such reputation for limiting himself to a single method of slaughtering his prey, and in Arabic he was called simply Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear.

“Why have you brought me here?” Sheba asked, when DeGroet’s silence had stretched on uncomfortably long. “What do you want from me?”

“You see that, Karoly? I told you she would be cooperative once we got her here.” Gabriel saw the man beside DeGroet, a short, broad fellow in black with a cigarette at his lips, nod impatiently. He looked around, intently scanning the area, and Gabriel ducked back behind the truck before Karoly’s gaze made it to where Gabriel was standing. This was DeGroet’s right hand, clearly—Andras was muscle, nothing more, dangerous only if you got within arm’s reach, but this Karoly would be dangerous at any distance.

“I didn’t say I would cooperate,” Sheba said. “I just asked—”

“Enough,” DeGroet said. “You will cooperate or I will cut that lovely dress off your body with three strokes of my sword and instruct every man here to take his pleasure with you. Do we understand each other?” He waited for a response. “Speak up, my dear. Do we understand each other?”

Sheba’s voice shook. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“We understand each other.”

“Do you believe I will do it or shall I give you a little taste to prove it?”

“No, I believe you.”

“Good,” DeGroet said, his voice softening again. “I regret the need to be so harsh with you, my dear, but we do have only a limited time here and there’s no telling how long it might take.”

“How long what might take?” Sheba said.

“Come here,” DeGroet said, and as they walked around the left paw of the Sphinx, their voices became quieter once more—enough so that Gabriel could no longer make out what was being said. He glanced around, picked a moment when no one was looking his way, then darted out from behind the truck to where a local stood with a shovel against one shoulder. Gabriel took aim carefully, then slugged him two-handed on the back of the head, catching him and the shovel both before either could land noisily on the ground. He dragged the man back to the truck, stripped him of his burnoose, and rolled him between the wheels, much as he had Stephen at the other end of the journey. Gabriel threw the burnoose on, slipped its hood over his head and crossed the layers of fabric over his chest to conceal the bandolier. He hefted the shovel and the rifle together and hastened off toward the long, low paw around which DeGroet and Sheba had disappeared.

He almost stumbled over them. They were both squatting on the ground, looking at a cleared-off patch near the base of the paw. Gabriel stopped himself a step shy of kicking DeGroet in the side and spun swiftly to face the other way. As he turned, he saw an expression of annoyance on Karoly’s face—the short man had seen how close a thing it had been, the near collision, and clearly saw no need to conceal his contempt for a worker so clumsy. Gabriel bent his head forward humbly, apologetically, trying to expose as little of his face as possible.

“When Thutmose found the Sphinx,” DeGroet was saying to Sheba, “only its head was visible—the rest was all covered by sand. He undertook to unearth it—to unbury it, as you say. But he only got as far as uncovering the figure’s chest and paws. The rest of the animal wasn’t completely uncovered until 1925.”

“And…?”

“And, my dear, once it was completely uncovered—that is, once the tons of sand had all been removed and the stone surface cleared—the men working at the restoration congratulated themselves on a job well done, took some photographs and went home. But the job was not done. There was more to be uncovered—below and within.”

“What are you talking about, ‘below’? ‘Within’?”

“Over the past dozen years, analysis with ground-penetrating radar has revealed open spaces deep within the body of the Sphinx.”

“In a figure this large,” Sheba said, “carved from a single piece of stone, that’s almost inevitable. There are open spaces in any hill or mountain, too—they’re called caves. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well, that’s your opinion,” DeGroet said, “and you’re in fine company, but your company is wrong and so are you. Most of the open spaces, it is true, are naturally occurring, irregular—but one is very clearly a man-made chamber. How do I know this? Simple: I was the one who commissioned the analysis, and I am the only one who possesses the full results.”

“All right, you possess the results. What’s the point?”

“The point, Miss McCoy, is that there’s a way inside the Great Sphinx and a chamber in there that no one has entered in four thousand years. And the reason no one has found it until now is that the entrance was sealed up—buried, if you will. And two hundred generations of royal sons and archaeologists and treasure hunters and historians have failed to unbury it. Until now. I am going to unbury it—with, my dear girl, your help.”

“Why do you need me?” Sheba said.

“Because you know how to read and interpret the instructions,” DeGroet said. “Unlike the last eight people I sent in, all of whom are now dead.”

Chapter 7

DeGroet snapped his fingers twice, pointed to the section of the paw they were next to, and then pulled Sheba away to one side. Two of the local workers—a hardy older man with wind-weathered cheeks and extravagant gray moustaches and a younger, beefier sort in a striped robe and fez, whose angular goatee and eyebrows made him look perpetually outraged—stepped forward and bent to the task of scraping out mortar around the edges of a block of stone that Gabriel hadn’t realized was a separate block to begin with. Which was the point, of course—for this block to have remained in place undetected for all these centuries, the seam would have had to have been pretty damn well concealed.

They made short work of it, no doubt because they’d done it at least eight times before. Grunting and straining, they then levered the stone out of the way, moving it first just a millimeter at a time, then an inch, then a few inches, and then all the way. It slid smoothly, though ponderously, across the ground and the two workers left it where it lay, smacking their hands together to get rid of dust or restore circulation or both. A third local, wearing the same sort of striped turban as the older man (and looking similar enough facially, Gabriel thought, that he was likely related—a son, a nephew, something), brought a handful of torches and passed them around: one to each of the first two workers, one to Karoly. He also held onto one for himself, but that left one extra, and behind DeGroet’s back, Gabriel stepped forward to take it. No way was he going to let Sheba go in there by herself.

The son/nephew went first, after lighting his torch with a flick of a lighter. The lighter went around from hand to hand and the torches all went alight quickly—they must have been doused in some sort of accelerant. Karoly followed the young man in, then DeGroet, pushing Sheba ahead of him, one of her bare and goose pimpled arms in his left fist, his sword in his right. The two workers who’d moved the stone looked at Gabriel then, offering him the privilege of following directly behind the boss, but Gabriel had his own reasons for not wanting to get too close to DeGroet and waved the others on ahead. They grabbed some bags of supplies from the ground and went inside. Then Gabriel ducked to squeeze through the dark entrance himself. As soon as he did, he realized that this was not just a passageway—it was a crudely carved staircase, descending steeply into the rock below the statue.

The steps were about half a foot high and Gabriel counted fifty-three of them before the descent bottomed out. So they were some twenty-five feet below the statue’s base. The passageway opened up, widening slightly, and the torchlight cast into relief a set of carved images on either side. Bordered with a double row of hieroglyphs above and below were long, narrow strips of art depicting seated deities with animal heads, men of various descriptions, what looked like scenes of court life on the left wall and of farming on the right. Sheba stopped at several points to examine a particular image or piece of writing, then continued on in silence.

Gabriel could only imagine what this was like for her—it was extraordinary enough for him, and he wasn’t a linguist with a specialization in ancient languages. To someone in Sheba’s field, this corridor by itself was a lifetime’s work, handed to her on a platter. At the same time, she was twenty-five feet underground, in a claustrophobic stone corridor, breathing musty air and not enough of it, surrounded by men with torches and blades who’d already kidnapped her twice and threatened to do worse. Of course Gabriel was there, too—but she didn’t know that, and there was no way he could tell her.

They came, eventually, to another staircase, this one leading up, and from the direction they’d been walking Gabriel concluded they were now ascending into the belly of the beast, literally: by his mental calculations he’d have said they were more or less at the geometric center of the Sphinx, equally far from the right and left sides, from front and back. The steps here were taller, and Gabriel only counted thirty of them before they had reached a chamber at the top. Gabriel hung back, pulled the fabric of the burnoose around to cover his nose and mouth and held his torch away from his face so that he remained in shadow.

“Rashidi,” DeGroet said and gestured at the young man in the lead. “Show her.”

Rashidi looked to his older relative for guidance, received a nod, and then cautiously brought his torch closer to the far wall.

Gabriel noticed two things immediately—three, really, if you counted the smell. The first was a rectangular panel on the wall, similar in size to the stele outside and filled with what to his eyes looked like similar writing. The second was a hole in the wall at waist height, circular and dark, just about wide enough for a trim man to fit inside.

Then there was the smell, which was the unwholesome odor of a morgue or a battlefield, the smell of bodies that had lain out too long and been neglected. Gabriel wondered if it was the remains of the unfortunate men DeGroet had sent in earlier that he was smelling. Even if they’d removed the bodies (and he didn’t see them lying around anywhere), this was certainly not the sort of place you could air out afterwards.

The flickering torchlight played over the writing on the wall and Gabriel saw Sheba’s face fixed in concentration. Her lips moved rapidly but without sound, as though she were talking to herself.

“You see what we are dealing with, Miss McCoy?” DeGroet said. “We’ve had the symbols translated as best we could—which was not very well, I’m afraid. But even if we knew accurately what each symbol meant, that wouldn’t tell us anything by itself, would it?”

“No,” Sheba said.

“So you tell us, please. What is on the other side of this wall, and how can we get to it?”

“It’s a…a reliquary, a storage chamber for, for…well, it says here ‘the remains of the gods,’ but the word for ‘remains’ is ambiguous, it could also refer to artifacts—artifacts depicting the gods, ritual artifacts, that sort of thing.” She paused. “There is a warning that says only priests shall enter. ‘A priest of Sekhmet may cross the threshold’—you see the lioness figure, there, that’s Sekhmet.”

“Good, good,” DeGroet said. “And how shall they enter?”

Sheba approached the wall, ran one index finger along the ancient images.

“‘Through the portal’—that’s this here, I’ve got to assume,” she said, pointing to the circular hole, “‘but,’ it says, ‘take heed the supplicant shall bear all right and proper offerings to…placate, mollify, something like that…the jealous heart of Hathor.’”

“And what does that mean?” DeGroet said.

Sheba shrugged. “There were many forms of ritual offering in ancient Egypt. Burnt offerings, bowls of grain, poured water, incantations.”

“And which form does it say is called for here?”

“It doesn’t.”

“It must,” DeGroet shouted, and his voice echoed from the close stone walls. “It must. Read it again.”

“I already—”

DeGroet whipped his sword up. The point of the blade danced an inch away from Sheba’s throat. “Read it again, I said.”

She stepped back, turned once more to face the inscription.

“‘…all right and proper offerings…jealous heart…’” Sheba’s voice took on a quality of despair as she ran her eyes along the rows of symbols again. Then her voice changed. “Wait, hold on. Here it talks about Hathor’s role as guardian of the floods, ensurer of fertility…it says, ‘Her heart is’…gladdened?…no, no, made light, ‘her heart is made light by the vision of her holy ones loaded down with the river’s wealth.’”

“The river’s wealth,” DeGroet said.

“It’s an expression you see in inscriptions during the Early Dynastic Period,” Sheba said. “They were a desert people and depended wholly on the Nile for survival. The river’s wealth was its water—that and the red silt it left behind, the rich dirt in which they could cultivate crops.”

“So what is it telling us,” DeGroet said, a mocking tone in his voice, “that we must carry mud to enter?”

“I don’t know,” Sheba said unhappily. “All I can tell you is what it says.”

DeGroet turned aside, surveyed his men.

Gabriel hung back, kept his chin tucked down.

“Zuka,” DeGroet said, pointing with his sword at the the older man, who was loaded down with the pair of canvas rucksacks he’d picked up on the way in. “You have canteens in those bags of yours?” The man nodded. “Mix up some mud.”

“Mud?” Zuka said. “With what?”

“You have a sandbag?” DeGroet said, and Zuka nodded again. “Use that.”

“But—”

“Use it,” DeGroet snapped. He turned to Rashidi. “You will carry it in.”

The young man’s face went pale, and Zuka’s head snapped up. “Not my son, please, effendi,” he said. “I will go. I will carry it.”

“You?” DeGroet growled. “Do you think you could fit inside that hole, you fat ox? Or Hanif—” he waved at the man with the goatee “—or Karoly?”

Karoly frowned at this.

“Send the woman,” Zuka said.

“I do not trust the woman,” DeGroet said. “Your son will do it.”

“But he will die, effendi.”

“He most certainly will die if he doesn’t go, since I will kill him, and you with him. Now make your mud.” Zuka miserably returned to mixing water from one of his goatskin canteens with the contents of a heavy sandbag.

“You,” DeGroet said, turning back to Sheba. “You will tell us what he is to do with this mud.”

“I don’t know!”

“Figure it out,” DeGroet snapped. “You have one minute.” He turned to Karoly. “It is like pulling teeth, sometimes. Getting anything done.”

Sheba went back to the writing, searching it for any further indication of how the offering was to be presented. Zuka remained kneeling on the floor, taking the sand and dirt that had filled the bag and mixing it with water in a loose, wet pile on the chamber’s floor. Rashidi stood alone in the center of the room, visibly trembling.

Gabriel’s hand tightened on the grip of the rifle in his hand. He would have to act—he had to do something. The only question was when. He could pull his guns now, grab Sheba, try to escape, but even assuming he didn’t get them both killed, the best he could hope for was to make it out alive—he’d never know what lay beyond the hole, what the ancient reliquary held. If there was any chance Sheba could coach Rashidi into opening it successfully…

“Inside the hole,” Sheba said, “there should be a basin, some sort of recessed area. He should put the offering in that. You’ll need to fill it completely,” she said to Rashidi. He nodded furiously, desperately. “Make sure you bring enough.”

The pile on the ground had grown considerably—Zuka had split open a second sandbag and emptied a second canteen. Anything to ensure his son’s success.

DeGroet flipped a metal pail into the air with the tip of his sword. Hanif caught it. “He can use that,” DeGroet said. “Go on, fill it.” Hanif fell to the task, scooping handfuls of the mud into the container.

When it was filled, he exchanged a glance with Zuka and handed the pail to Rashidi.

“Go slowly,” DeGroet told the young man. “You don’t want to end up like the others, do you?” Rashidi violently shook his head. “Then for god’s sake, be careful. You understand what you are going to do?” Rashidi nodded. “Then tell me.”

“I am going to pour the mud into a basin.”

“It may not be an actual basin,” Sheba said. “It might just be a, a, a depression, a shallow area. Or a hole—there could just be a hole.”

“A hole,” Rashidi said.

“Enough,” DeGroet said. “In with you.” And he struck Rashidi smartly on the backs of his legs with the flat of his blade.

The young man took off his cloak and crawled into the hole, pushing the container of mud before him. It was a tight fit. He wriggled to get his shoulders and head inside, then his torso, and finally his legs. For a moment, his feet remained, sticking out of the hole, but one at a time they vanished inside, too.

A moment later they heard his voice, muffled and echoing in the enclosed space. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

“Feel for it,” Sheba called out. “On the bottom.”

Silence.

“Do you feel anything?” she shouted.

“Rashidi?” DeGroet said. “She asked you a question.”

“I do,” his voice came. “It’s like a bowl, with sloping sides.”

“Good,” Sheba said. “Are you filling it?”

“Yes,” came the voice. And a moment later: “It’s full.” And then: “What should I do now?”

DeGroet looked at Sheba who had nothing to offer but a look of grave uncertainty. “Keep going,” he shouted.

“No,” Sheba said, “don’t, it could be booby-trapped—”

They all heard a sound then, a terrible sound, the sound of stone moving against stone deep within the wall, rapidly gathering momentum, like a heavy boulder as it topples off the side of a cliff, gaining speed as it sweeps past; and then the sound of a collision, but only briefly, as though the object in the stone’s path had offered only token resistance and been plowed through.

“No!” Zuka shouted, and he ran forward, dived head-first into the hole himself. DeGroet had been right—he could not fit past his shoulders, but he knelt with his head and arms inside, reaching for something, groping, then finally grasping and pulling, extracting. Gabriel saw Zuka’s head pop out of the hole first, then his arms emerged, and in each hand one of his son’s boot heels. Zuka pulled at his son’s body and it came, shins and thighs and lower torso—but where his upper torso should have been there was nothing. He’d been sliced neatly in half at the breastbone.

Zuka fell back, howling.

“Of course it’s trapped,” DeGroet said, disgusted. “Whatever did you think you were here for?”

Chapter 8

The smell was stronger now, and no doubt at all about its source. Gabriel saw Sheba turn aside, one hand clapped over her mouth.

“If you insist on being sick, Miss McCoy,” DeGroet said, “please do so quickly. We have work to do.” He swung around, saw Zuka kneeling over Rashidi’s remains, seemed about to say something, then held himself back. He paced over to the still considerable heap of mud on the ground and kicked at it, sending a clod or two against the wall. There was a second metal pail where he’d picked up the first one, and he snagged its handle on the end of his sword. Without looking, he lifted it into the air and sent it flying behind him—in Gabriel’s direction.

“You,” he said. “You’re not fat, at least. Why don’t you give it a try?”

Gabriel caught the pail against his chest with the arm in which he held the torch; in the other, he still held the shovel and the rifle. The folds of the burnoose were wound around the bottom half of his face but Karoly, looking over, recognized him from outside. “Lajos, no,” he said in Hungarian, “this man’s clumsy as hell, he’ll be dead in no time.”

“Well, if he is so clumsy,” DeGroet said, loudly, in English, “then his death will be no loss.” Without looking over at him, he snapped a command at Gabriel. “Fill it!”

Gabriel hesitated a moment, his fist tightening on the rifle’s stock. He saw Karoly’s hand drop to the sidearm on his hip. With his own hands full like this, there was no way he could beat Karoly to the draw.

He let the rifle down slowly, set it against the wall, then put the pail down beside the mud pile. He used the shovel to fill it, then set that aside, too. The pail was heavy when he lifted it, the metal of the handle cutting into his palm.

He kept his face averted as he walked past DeGroet toward the far wall and its deadly tunnel.

The hole loomed. What had Sheba called it? The portal. For nine men it had been a portal to the underworld, from this life to the next. What chance was there that it would be anything less for him?

Nonsense, he said to himself. You’ve been in tighter spots. (Though measuring the tunnel’s narrow opening against his shoulders, he wasn’t so sure.) You’ve seen traps like this before and defeated them.

Yes, replied a little voice in his head, but all the knowledge and experience in the world won’t stop a ten-ton boulder from snipping you in half if you’re lying beneath it.

“Miss McCoy, have you got any advice for our newest volunteer?”

Sheba looked up. She’d been leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, her chest heaving. It was one hell of a chest, and Gabriel had to admit that, if this had to be his last sight on earth, there were worse ones to have. With DeGroet behind him, he pulled the burnoose to one side, uncovering his face, and cocked a crooked smile at Sheba. “Do not cry, effendi,” he said softly in Arabic, and recognition came all at once into her eyes. She started toward him but he shook his head minutely. With an enormous effort she restrained herself, but the look in her eyes changed from momentary relief to terror, a mute pleading.

“No,” she said to DeGroet, “no, this man can’t go, you can’t send him, he’ll die—”

“We all must die sometime,” DeGroet said. “But if you are so concerned for his well-being, why don’t you tell him something that might help him once he’s in there?”

“But I don’t know anything,” she said, and Gabriel could tell that she wished with all her heart that this wasn’t so. “A tribute,” she said rapidly, running through the text in her head, “an offering to Hathor, the river’s wealth, must deposit a heavy burden to make her heart light…that’s all it says. Please…please don’t send him.” Her eyes slid shut again and her voice got very small. “Send me. I’ll do it. Send me instead.”

“Oh, don’t worry, my dear,” DeGroet said. “You’ll be next.”

Gabriel felt the flat of DeGroet’s blade strike his calves.

He handed the torch silently to Sheba, bent to set the pail down within the hole, and shoved it far enough in that he could squeeze in behind it. The tunnel walls just barely accommodated his shoulders and for a few feet he feared he might actually get stuck, but the tunnel widened slightly after that, the left and right walls angling away from one another at the top, almost like an inverted trapezoid. He found the fit snug but not uncomfortably so. He had been in tighter spots—while caving, for instance. And he’d gotten out of those, hadn’t he?

With his arms outstretched, he pushed the pail ahead of him, a few inches at a time, and then followed slowly behind it, feeling his way. The darkness was complete, not a trace of light from either end. He dug beneath the fabric of the burnoose to his jacket underneath, straining to reach the closed inner pocket with the Zippo lighter inside. He brought the lighter out and flicked it open. A tiny orange flame bloomed.

The inner walls the flame revealed were smooth, though hand-carved. They were damp, not just beneath him, where the smell of Rashidi’s blood explained it, but on the sides and ceiling as well. He could see the pronounced V-shape the walls made—though the hole in the other room had been circular, the tunnel itself was more like a trough or a channel, with the tops of the side walls significantly farther apart than their bottoms. And there were no carvings on either of the walls, no further instructions for those of Sekhmet’s priests who made it this far.

He thought about the text Sheba had read, describing the required offering. The opposition of “heavy” and “light” wouldn’t have been accidental. Not when the instruction involved placing something heavy—he pushed the pail forward another few inches—into a receptacle; not when it was the descent of some sort of heavy mechanism that had separated Rashidi into top and bottom halves.

He crept another foot forward and then, feeling ahead of him, found the rim of the basin into which Rashidi had poured his bucket of mud. The bucket was nowhere to be seen, and the top half of Rashidi’s body, similarly, had vanished.

From outside he heard a voice, DeGroet’s. “What have you found?”

“Nothing,” he called back. It was the truth.

“Well get a move on,” came the shouted reply.

He held the flame of his lighter to the basin—it was empty. How that could be, he didn’t know, given that it had been full just minutes earlier. He felt around the basin for any drainage hole through which the mud might have escaped—nothing.

Turning over, he looked up at the ceiling. At a glance it looked no different from the rest of the tunnel, but upon closer inspection he could make out the concealed edges of a distinct block, much like those of the section of the Sphinx’s paw Zuka and Hanif had manhandled out of the way at ground level. Clearly this block could move, too—specifically, it could come down, with great force, and anything lying beneath it would get driven violently down along with it.

But what would happen then? Wouldn’t the stone block hammering down shatter the basin beneath it when it struck, or at least leave crushed, pulped matter behind when it rose again?

It would—unless, Gabriel realized, the block containing the basin moved as well, swung out of the way at the same time the block descending from above came down. He pictured the block containing the basin and the one above it as teeth on a giant stone gear that rotated when provoked. You poured your mud into the basin, after a moment the weight caused the wheel to turn, the basin block fell out of the way and the new block from the ceiling rotated in to take its place—with a new empty basin of its own on its upper surface.

And anything that happened to be lying between the two blocks at the time got chopped as the upper block rotated down to take the place of the lower.

It was a devilish trap—clever but simple, and a marvel mechanically. The stone gear must weigh tons, many tons; how it had been carved and moved into place and mounted on some sort of axle and hidden within the rock he couldn’t imagine. But then no one had figured out how the Egyptians had managed to build the pyramids either. There was no shortage of mechanical marvels on the Giza Plateau.

Of course, the question of how one might build a trap like this was of secondary importance. The first order of business was surviving this one.

So: what to do?

Not pour the mud, clearly; he couldn’t even move the pail onto the stone surface surrounding the basin, since the weight would set off the trap. Nor could he put his own weight on it—but how could he make it across to the other side without doing so?

Gabriel thought about it. It had taken perhaps half a minute between when Rashidi had poured the mud and when the mechanism had crushed him. In theory Gabriel might be able to rush across in that time and be out of the way of the descending block before it fell. In theory. And in practice, too, if he’d been upright, with room to maneuver. But not in this tight, narrow tunnel—he couldn’t inch his way far enough fast enough, which no doubt had been what the men who built the tunnel had in mind.

But there had to be a way through. Unless the builders were merely playing a cruel game and there was no reliquary to be found, only a tool for slaughtering unwary priests who were foolish enough to follow the instructions you gave them, to deposit the treasure of the Nile in the place you provided for it…

The place provided for it.

If Gabriel had had more room, he might have slapped himself on the forehead. Of course. What if there had been more than one place provided for it? A priest of Sekhmet would know how to follow the instructions properly, while an impostor would make the same mistake Rashidi and Sheba had made, and that Gabriel had nearly made himself.

Where did Hathor’s floods deposit the life-giving silt that brought fertility to the Nile Valley? In a basin at the bottom of the river? No—on the river’s banks, for Egyptians to find and harvest.

And here he was in a V-shaped channel, with the walls angling away to either side—like a river.

Who said the blocks before him were the only portion of the tunnel walls that could move?

Gabriel reached into the pail, grabbed a handful of mud, and smeared it on the wall beside him, as high up as he could reach. He coated the surface and went back for more. He slapped the mud onto the stone, piling it up, replacing it when bits slid down. Bit by bit, he built up the upper portion of the V, filling in the angle, adding the weight of the mud to the stone surface. He felt it move, very slightly, as the mud accumulated—and as he reached the bottom of the pail, he heard a soft grinding noise deep inside the wall.

This was it. A mechanism was turning.

But which mechanism?

He looked up at the deadly stone above him, ominous in the flickering flame of his lighter. If it came down, it would come in an instant, snuffing him out like…well, like the flame went out now as he hastily pocketed the lighter.

The sound grew louder, and apparently it was audible outside, too, because he heard Sheba scream, “Gabriel, no!”

“Gabriel?” DeGroet said, and then he said something else, but Gabriel couldn’t hear what it was because the grinding of the stone was too loud in his ears—

And then the angled wall beside him began to turn in earnest beneath its mantle of mud.

As the wall rotated counterclockwise, the top portion headed downwards—but the bottom portion, the portion closer to Gabriel, turned upwards, and it wedged itself under Gabriel as it went, lifting him, till finally a long section of the side wall was horizontal and he was lying on top of it, his burnoose thickly covered with mud.

And it wasn’t done yet.

One more turn of the hidden mechanism and the wall was now angled downward again—only in the opposite direction, facing away from the tunnel rather than toward it.

At which point gravity took over, and Gabriel went sliding through the mud, off the edge, and out into space.

Chapter 9

He fell for just an instant—then landed with a thud on a stone floor. Standing, he stripped off the ruined burnoose, flung it down and flicked open his lighter again.

The room was large, the flame tiny. But bit by bit it revealed his surroundings. There was a wall covered with hieroglyphs beside him and, leaning up against the wall at an angle, a huge stone carving of a Pharaoh’s face, similar to the face of the Sphinx itself. Just past that were two upright caskets, both standing open. The dead body in one was partially mummified, its head and arms and upper torso preserved in linen bandages, the rest of its body uncovered and worn down by the centuries till all that remained were prominent bones encased in shrunken, leathery flesh. The other casket was empty but for a handful of broken lengths of bone at the bottom.

Gabriel picked up one of these, returned to where he’d landed, and tore the driest strip he could from the burnoose. It took half a minute, after he’d wrapped the fabric tightly around the bone, for the flame from the lighter to catch and the fabric to ignite. What he wouldn’t have given for one of those accelerant-treated torches now…

A voice slithered in through the tunnel, a shout in tone but muffled due to the distance it had to travel. “Hunt! I know it’s you. And I know better than to believe you’re dead. Say something, damn you!”

Gabriel didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a quick tour of the room. On the surface of one wall there was a recessed rectangular groove, roughly the shape and size of a door—this was the other side of the panel with the writing on it in the entry chamber, Gabriel realized. It was barred crosswise by two long pieces of granite resting in stone brackets protruding from the wall, which suggested that the giant block the groove outlined might be movable, if the bars were removed.

“Hunt!”

The neighboring wall was the one with the hieroglyphics and the caskets. Beside the caskets there were shelves carved into the wall with rows of canopic jars lined up on them, their tops sculpted with images of the sons of Horus: Duamutef, with his jackal’s head; Qebehsenuf, with the head of an eagle; and so forth. These would have held the organs of the mummified man in the coffin—or of some mummified man, anyway.

“Answer me, Hunt! I can hear you walking, for Christ’s sake!”

He kept walking, his flickering torchlight illuminating the walls as he passed them.

The third wall was bare, nothing on it or before it. But the fourth—

The fourth was something else entirely.

“Hunt,” DeGroet shouted. “Hunt, if you don’t answer me, I will kill her.” And he heard Sheba scream.

“You won’t kill her,” Gabriel shouted back, “or I will destroy what you came here to find.”

The canopic jars, the caskets, the half-wrapped mummy—these things were priceless, it was true, and sufficiently impressive additions to any man’s collection to warrant the expense and trouble DeGroet had undertaken to find them. But as soon as he approached the fourth wall Gabriel knew that DeGroet was after a much bigger prize.

The wall was painted, from floor to ceiling, with a map. Or more precisely with part of a map, since what there was ended at a jagged line and was clearly, deliberately incomplete. The outlines of a triangular landmass were traced, and the upper portion of a teardrop-shaped island below. But the lower portion of the island was missing.

And seated before the map, directly below this missing portion, was a stone sculpture of a sphinx.

Not the crude sort of monumental stonework that defined the Great Sphinx itself, or even the more careful, delicate sculpture of the canopic jars—that was still stylized rather than naturalistic. But this sculpture…Gabriel approached it, circled around to view it from all sides. It was almost like a piece from Europe’s Baroque period, with loving attention lavished on realistically depicting the rippling muscles beneath the skin of the leonine torso, the sunken cheeks and troubled brow and half-open mouth of the human head. It was life-size, perhaps a bit larger—maybe nine feet long and four feet tall. He’d never seen Egyptian sculpture that looked like this. He didn’t think anyone had.

And on its flank was carved an inscription. His Ancient Egyptian was rusty—Sheba would have done a better job of translating it. But as best he could make out, it said something like,Here reposes for eternity the Father of Fear,His mortal portions entombed,His secrets kept by stone tongue,His divine treasure returnedTo the Cradle of Fear

DeGroet’s voice thundered: “You wouldn’t dare destroy it, Hunt. An artifact this important, you wouldn’t—”

“Let her go,” Gabriel shouted, “or I swear to you there’ll be nothing here but rubble.”

“All right,” DeGroet said. “All right.” Then, after a moment: “Tell him you’re free, my dear. Go on.”

Sheba’s voice floated in: “I’m…free, Gabriel.”

The tension in her voice made him skeptical.

“There’s a hidden doorway to the room you’re in, Lajos,” Gabriel said. “It’s the only way you’re going to get in here unless you want to crawl through the tunnel, and I don’t think you do.” He was still looking at the extraordinary statue. His secrets kept by stone tongue…He wondered how literally the inscription was to be taken.

“I am willing to open the doorway,” he called, “but only if you promise that no harm will come to either Miss McCoy or myself. Do you agree?” He knew DeGroet’s word was worthless and paid no attention to the man’s shouted response. Gabriel was just playing for time while, holding the torch close to the head of the sphinx, he stuck the smallest finger of his free hand into its mouth and felt beneath the statue’s tongue.

There was something there.

“I said I agree,” DeGroet shouted. “Now open the door, Hunt.”

“All right,” Gabriel said, fishing out the hard, circular, metal object. “Step away from Miss McCoy. I don’t want you anywhere near her, and no guns pointed at her either. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

The object was the size of a coin, with an image of a sphinx on one side. A sphinx with wings. A Greek sphinx.

“Sheba,” Gabriel called, “have they stepped away?”

Sheba answered: “A bit. Not very far.”

“Enough’s enough, Hunt,” DeGroet shouted. “Open the door now.”

“All right.” Gabriel returned to the wall separating this room from the entry chamber and lifted the granite bars from the brackets one by one. He leaned then against the wall. Then he put his shoulder to the rectangular block outlined by the recessed groove, braced himself and shoved.

The block rotated a few inches, as if on a central axis, then a few more when he shoved again. One more shove should do it—but Gabriel stepped back instead.

If he pushed it the rest of the way open, he might well find himself walking into an ambush. Whereas if he made them do it…

He darted over to the two open caskets. Ancient Egyptians hadn’t been six feet tall—but by bending his knees, Gabriel was able to fit himself into the empty one. He pressed the end of his torch to the ground, stepping on it to extinguish the flame, then dropped it and took his Colt from its holster.

The room was perfectly, completely dark. And for a moment it was silent.

Then a crack of light appeared as he heard the sound of a shoulder ramming against the stone door from the other side. The crack widened into a wedge, and a moment later he saw Zuka charge through the opening holding a torch in one hand and brandishing a deadly looking curved sword in the other. He was wearing an expression that contained all of his grief, transmuted into rage.

Hanif came through the doorway behind him, his red fez tipped slightly forward, tassel soaring, mouth open in a bellow—and in his fist he held a poignard, a short dagger with a silver blade, ready to plunge it down between Gabriel’s shoulder blades if only he could find them.

Finally DeGroet entered, forcing Sheba ahead of him at swordpoint.

Gabriel raised his Colt. He aimed carefully at Zuka and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The hammer fell—but no gunshot followed. The wrong bullets, damn it! But the sound of the hammer landing had been loud enough to give away his location.

Gabriel dived out of the casket and heard it crash to the ground behind him. He barreled through the semidarkness directly at Sheba and snatched her out of in front of DeGroet’s saber with one arm around her waist. He saw her hands fly up and her mouth go wide in a terrified scream. He leaned close to her ear and whispered, “It’s me.”

But there was no time for further conversation. Zuka and Hanif were coming at them from opposite directions, blades held high—and in the tumult he saw Karoly enter the chamber, too. No sword for him: he raised an automatic pistol and leveled it at Gabriel’s chest.

Desperately Gabriel raised the Colt and fired again. This time, for whatever reason, the firing pin struck true, and flame spat from the end of the revolver. He saw Karoly’s hand jerk back and his pistol go flying. The short man swore loudly, a vicious Magyar curse.

Gabriel lifted Sheba off her feet and swung her toward Hanif. She lashed out with one bare foot at the top of her arc, cracking him across the face and sending his fez flying. Gabriel, meanwhile, kicked backwards with one leg, catching Zuka in the gut. The man collapsed, gasping.

Gabriel set Sheba down on the ground again and whispered urgently: “Run!”

“Where?” she said.

“Out,” Gabriel said, and fired another shot in Karoly’s direction. He looked around, but couldn’t see DeGroet anywhere. Maybe the old man had fled to a safer spot when he realized he was in a situation where a sword couldn’t offer much in the way of protection.

Gabriel pointed Sheba toward the doorway and gave her a shove. It was all she needed—she was off and running. Gabriel followed close behind, but was pulled back by an arm around his throat. Karoly? Hanif? It didn’t matter which. He swung around and smashed whoever it was into the giant carved stone face behind him, which teetered from the impact. The man’s arm didn’t release, though. He smashed backwards again and then once more, and finally the man’s grip loosened and he tumbled off.

The doorway was just steps away. Gabriel ran through—

—and felt a long narrow blade slide deep into the flesh of his arm.

He jerked free, saw DeGroet outlined by the torchlight from the other room. The sword blade flickered briefly in the darkness like a serpent darting. It caught him across the cheek, opening a gash. He tasted his own blood, running into his mouth.

He remembered Karoly’s warning to Andras earlier, at the airport: Maybe he’ll use you for practice. Cut you to ribbons.

“You’ve interfered with my plans for the last time, Hunt,” DeGroet said, his voice all the more frightening for being quiet and calm. “Now I rid myself of you once and for all.” And he gave a little salute with his sword before lunging in for the kill.

Gabriel whipped the bandolier of rifle bullets over his head and caught the blade with it as DeGroet sent it stabbing toward his chest. Sidestepping, he yanked hard, pulling DeGroet’s sword arm wide. That gave him room to step in and swing a fist into the side of DeGroet’s skull. It wouldn’t have been quite as powerful a blow if Gabriel hadn’t been holding his gun in that hand; but he was, and DeGroet crumpled to the floor at his feet.

He ran. His left arm ached where DeGroet’s blade had penetrated it; his sleeve was slick and heavy with blood. And his cheek felt like it had been split open to the bone. But he couldn’t think about any of that now. Behind him he heard voices shouting in Arabic, English, and Hungarian, angry shouts coming closer as he plunged down the stairs in the darkness. He raced across the long tunnel that would return him to the surface, heavy pounding footsteps clamoring behind him and lighter ones pattering desperately up ahead—Sheba’s. He caught up with her halfway up the staircase and they plunged through the hole in the Sphinx’s paw together.

Dawn was just starting to break over the Nile, the rising sun’s rays streaking the sky a hundred shades of pink and purple and amber. It was a staggering sight and Gabriel would have given anything to be able to take pleasure in it. But he couldn’t. Their pursuers were only steps behind, and the workers out here, though temporarily startled to see them emerge, wouldn’t stay dumbstruck for long.

He grabbed Sheba’s arm and steered her down to where the camels and cars stood side by side. The drivers’ seats of the cars were empty, but so were the ignition slots. One good thing about a camel, he thought, as he slung Sheba up onto the back of a particularly tall and hardy-looking animal and then vaulted up after her: no key required.

He kicked the camel’s sides sharply and they took off into the desert.

“They’re coming,” Sheba said, looking back.

“Of course they are,” Gabriel muttered. “Why wouldn’t they be.”

“They’re getting in the cars!”

“Naturally,” Gabriel said. In the distance he could hear the engines revving. He was holding onto the reins for all he was worth and driving the animal forward at top speed. For the time being their lead was still widening—but that wouldn’t last long.

“What are we going to do?” Sheba said, facing forward again. She was clinging tightly to Gabriel from behind. It was a pleasant sensation, her soft flesh pressing up against his back, but not quite enough to make him forget about the pain in his arm—or about the men coming up behind them.

“Couple of options,” he said as they raced over the hard-packed sand. “We can’t outrun them, and we won’t be able to lose them if we head into Cairo—they’d have the advantage there. But if we can get into an area where this guy can travel but cars can’t…”

“Do you know of one near here?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“What’s the other option?”

“Get captured,” Gabriel said. “Probably get killed.”

“Oh,” Sheba said.

Gabriel steered them toward a slightly rockier, more mountainous section of the desert in the middle distance. He wasn’t at all confident they could reach it before being overtaken.

A gunshot split the air behind them and a bullet sped by near enough that they could feel the breeze from its passage.

“Take my gun,” Gabriel said, gesturing with his elbow toward his hip. “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

“Yes,” Sheba said, pulling the Colt from its holster. “What? You don’t think kids learn to shoot in Ireland?”

“Not at all,” Gabriel said. “I just didn’t know you had. Glad to hear otherwise.” Another gunshot exploded near them. “You might want to start putting that learning to use now.”

Sheba had already swiveled in place and braced her arm against the camel’s hump, and now she squeezed off a shot that left the windshield of the nearest car behind them shattered. The car wheeled off erratically, its driver losing blood from a wound in his shoulder.

But there were more cars behind that one, more than there were bullets in the gun, and more guns in them, too; and though a racing camel wasn’t the easiest target in the world to hit from a moving car, it wasn’t the smallest target either, and they wouldn’t keep missing forever.

The area of rocky outcroppings was getting closer. It had something of the quality of a canyon, and Gabriel thought it might just be possible to lose the cars in there, if only because it would be too dangerous for them to drive into it, for fear of cracking up against the narrow walls. But first he had to make it there. It was going to be close. He kicked inward with his heels again, demanding of the poor beast every last ounce of energy it had.

They were within yards of the first outcropping when he heard the put-put-put-put of a helicopter’s blades.

His heart fell. No. Not this close—

As he watched, a black Sikorsky chopper rose up from behind the rocks, facing them. Beside the pilot, a man stood halfway out of the cockpit, one leg on the landing skid, a machine gun aimed down at them. And painted on the underside of the copter—it couldn’t be…

“Gabriel, watch out!” Sheba shouted, pointing.

“Hold onto me,” Gabriel said, and urged the animal forward. “Around my neck.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, but she followed his direction, looping her arms around him.

“Just hold on,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

The copter was charging downward toward them at a steep angle. The gunman hadn’t started firing yet, but they saw him take aim. He was almost on top of them.

“Gabriel!” Sheba screamed.

Then the gunman kicked something with one foot, and it fell, unfurling as it came, dangling below the belly of the copter, and Gabriel let go of the camel’s reins to reach up and grab hold as it passed overhead. A rope ladder—and as Gabriel held tight with one good arm and one wounded one to the lowest rung, they were swiftly lifted off the camel’s back, Gabriel clinging to the ladder and Sheba clinging onto him, legs wrapping tightly around his waist.

The gunman overhead cut loose with a flurry of bullets that brought the cars behind them to a screaming halt. A few of the drivers reached out through their open windows and fired up at them, but they were firing blind and the bullets missed by a mile.

The copter sped off, rapidly gaining altitude. Looking up, Gabriel saw the man above them toss his smoking gun into the cockpit and begin hauling the rope ladder back aboard.

Gabriel concentrated on holding onto the ladder until the skid was in reach, then carefully shifted his grip over. The man above him helped Sheba into the cabin, then stuck out a hand to help Gabriel.

“Michael send you?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Shouting to be heard over the noise of the chopper’s blades and engine, he said, “Told me to give you a message. Said keep your cell phone charged next time. We had a hell of a time locating you.”

Gabriel hauled himself up and inside. He fell back against the padded seat, breathing heavily.

The gunman pulled the cabin door shut and Gabriel saw in reverse on the glass the same thing he’d spotted painted on the chopper’s belly from camelback below: the Hunt Foundation crest.

The pilot called back over his shoulder. “Where we going now?”

“You need a hospital?” the gunman asked, pointing to Gabriel’s bloody face and injured arm.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I can take care of that myself.” He dug into his pocket, passed the ancient coin to Sheba. Her eyes widened as she recognized the symbol on it.

“We’re going to Chios,” Gabriel said.

Chapter 10

Sheba stood on the balcony and looked out over the cove with its beach of tiny volcanic pebbles worn smooth by the rolling surf. There was no one on the beach; no one within half a mile of the beach, in fact, other than her and Gabriel. The chopper had let them off in a nearby clearing and they’d walked the rest of the way. The first thing she’d done when they reached the house was strip off the satin dress, fill the tub with warm water, and soak her feet. They’d been filthy and scraped and bruised and sore and she’d kept soaking them till at least they weren’t filthy anymore.

Gabriel had explored the house, meanwhile, doing what he could to shore up the security of the place, which wasn’t much—it was a beach house on a Greek island, after all, not a fortress. Then he’d returned to the bathroom, where he’d taken off his shirt tenderly, wincing as the fabric pulled away from where it had stuck to the wound in his arm. He was for putting on a bandage and leaving it at that, but Sheba had insisted on dragging him into the tub and washing the wound, and the rest of him, too, while she was at it, and before either of them quite knew what was happening, her aching feet and his bruised and torn flesh were temporarily forgotten.

Now she was standing in the salt breeze wafting off the Aegean, naked as Aphrodite, long hair lying in a damp tangle between her shoulder blades, and Gabriel was seated at a glass-topped table beside her, dressed once again from the waist down, waiting while his shirt dried on the balcony’s railing. He was flipping the ancient coin and catching it in his palm.

“It’s impossible, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “You know that.”

“You know it. You’re the Ph.D. All I know is that this coin was in the statue’s mouth.”

“Chios was populated that early, but the Greeks didn’t start minting coins until the seventh century BC. The Great Sphinx is almost two thousand years older than that.”

“Well, maybe it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe someone in Chios started making coins earlier than anyone thinks. Or maybe whoever dug that passageway and chamber did it two thousand years after the Sphinx was carved. There’s only one thing we know for sure.”

She turned to face him. It was distracting to say the least. “What’s that?” she said.

“I found this coin,” Gabriel said, “in the statue’s mouth.”

She came over and took it from him. The design depicted a seated sphinx facing to the left beside a narrow wine jug—an amphora—overhung by a bunch of grapes. The sphinx’s face was in profile and clearly meant to be female. Her feathered wings coiled up from her shoulders. It was one of the most familiar images of ancient numismatics, the sphinx emblem of Chios.

“What do you think, how did a Greek coin get into a hidden room deep inside the Great Sphinx in Egypt?” Gabriel said.

“There was plenty of contact between their cultures,” Sheba said. “As soon as the Greeks started coming over by boat, you see influences from each civilization on the other.”

“But a coin in a statue’s mouth—is that a ritual you’ve ever heard of?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Me, neither,” Gabriel said. He got up, grabbed his shirt, and headed inside. Sheba followed.

“What about the map on the wall?” Sheba asked. He’d told her about the map during the flight over, while the gunman had been radioing ahead, trying to find an empty house the Foundation could rent on four hours’ notice.

“No question about it,” Gabriel said, “it was crude, but it was clearly a drawing of the southern coastline of India with Sri Lanka below it.”

“The dates are off there as well,” Sheba said. “We know there was trade between Egypt and Sri Lanka as early as 1500 BC, but not a thousand years earlier.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gabriel said, “but I’ve found when you’re dealing with ancient history, plus or minus a thousand years can be well within the margin of error.”

“Spoken like a man who flunked history.”

“I aced math, though.”

“Gabriel,” Sheba said, “you can’t deny there’s something funny going on here. A statue of a sphinx that’s carved in a realistic style that wouldn’t be developed till thousands of years later…a map of a place the Egyptians wouldn’t make it to for centuries…a coin that wouldn’t be minted for centuries…”

“Yeah. Well, we’re not going to find an explanation sitting around here.” He pulled his shirt on over the thick pad of gauze tapped to his upper arm. Stitches would’ve been better, but stitches would have to wait. “We need to find someone who can tell us something about this coin. A local expert.”

“Where are you going to look for one?”

“Closest town’s probably Avgonyma,” he said. “Figured I’d head over there, scout around.”

“Be careful,” Sheba said. “DeGroet might have men here.”

Gabriel shook his head. “He never saw the coin. And no one followed us in the chopper.”

“DeGroet’s even richer than you are, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “He could have men on every island in the Mediterranean.”

“I’ll be careful,” Gabriel said. He buckled on his holster and put his jacket on over it. Ninety degrees outside and he was wearing a leather jacket.

“Don’t act like you’re doing me a favor,” Sheba said. “Though actually you could do me one if you wanted to. While you’re in town.”

Gabriel paused in the doorway. “What’s that?”

“You could get me a pair of shoes,” Sheba said.

Leather jacket or not, there were worse ways to spend an hour than on a two-mile walk through the sand and scrub of a Greek island, the midday sun shining down on you, no living soul in sight but a pair of goats, the iron bells around their necks clanking as they grazed. Chios lay in the Aegean Sea like a muscled forearm, its elbow jutting toward Turkey, its fist toward the Cyclades. Gabriel’s destination was just below the bicep, where a tattoo of an anchor or a mermaid might go if the arm in question belonged to a sailor—or of a sphinx if it belonged to one of the island’s traditionalists. The sphinx had been a symbol of Chios dating back to the island’s prehistory, when its rocky shores had been inhabited by primitive communities of fishermen and winemakers and farmers. Many amphorae from the period had survived, the clay surfaces of the vessels bearing the same sphinx-and-grapes design as the coin now in his pocket, scrapings of their interiors revealing the ancient residue of wine or olive oil or the peculiar mastic resin native to Chios.

After climbing from sea level up into hills high enough to qualify as small mountains, Gabriel emerged in a clearing surrounded by pine forest, the dusty road leading into a warren of one- and two-story stone buildings. The stones looked to have been quarried from the hills he had just climbed and fit together with the most rudimentary sort of mortar; from their boxy shape and general construction, the buildings looked like they dated back to the medieval period. One or two had thatched awnings and wooden chairs out front, some with wooden tables between them; most of the seats were unoccupied, though in one an old woman slept, baking in the sun with a cat at her feet.

The streets were largely empty, so Gabriel was a bit surprised when, on walking through the arched doorway of one of the buildings, he saw a crowd of perhaps a dozen and a half men breathlessly clustered around a bar. Then he recognized the sound of a transistor radio behind the bar delivering a sports announcer’s play-by-play. At one exclamation from the device the men all groaned, except for one who went around the circle collecting money from all the others. The bartender, a bald man with prominent eyes and a heavy five-o’clock shadow even at noon, flicked off the radio and the men dispersed to separate tables around the room, all except for two particularly disconsolate-looking souls who remained at the bar.

Gabriel took a seat beside them and ordered a glass of the local Ariousios Oinos. It was said that the city of Chios had been founded by a son of Dionysus himself, and the Chians were accordingly proud of their wine. It was heavy, heady stuff, a red so dark it was almost black. You tasted echoes, Gabriel thought, swallowing, of Homer’s wine-dark seas, on which Odysseus and Agamemnon and so many others came to grief.

“Tourist?” the bartender said, in a thick accent and wearing a cheek-stretching grin. “American?”

“American,” Gabriel answered, in Greek, “but not a tourist.”

He saw the phony smile on the bartender’s face relax into something more like a normal human facial expression. It wasn’t a smile anymore so much as a tired grimace. “Would you look at me,” he said, “look at what I’ve come to, playing the monkey when someone comes in. Feh.” He spat on the floor from the side of his mouth. “No one comes here anymore. This used to be the high season. Now, maybe once every four days, five days, one tourist, one couple, maybe, they order one drink apiece and don’t tip. But I smile, smile, say thank you mister American, thank you for your dollar.” He spat again, then slopped some liquor from a jug into a water glass and sampled his own wares. “Cigarette?”

He held a crumpled pack out toward Gabriel.

“Thanks,” Gabriel said, pulling one cigarette out and letting it dangle between his fingers after the man lit it with a wooden match. He didn’t smoke, but he’d learned over the years that you didn’t make friends anywhere in the world by turning down an offered cigarette.

“So what brings you to this rump of a village?” One of the men next to Gabriel looked up angrily at this insult, but said nothing, perhaps because the bartender took the opportunity to refill his glass. “You’re a magazine writer, a photographer, what?” The bartender eyed Gabriel critically. “You don’t look Greek.”

“I’m not. Though I spent a lot of time here growing up. My parents loved it in Greece. They died not too far from here.”

The bartender nodded. “Then you are Greek enough. If your dead are buried in our soil.”

Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt, two of the bestselling authors of the last fifty years thanks to a pair of improbably successful books of religious history, weren’t buried anywhere—they’d disappeared at sea during a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean and Gabriel’s best efforts had failed to turn up any sign of their bodies. He’d spent eight months searching while, back home, Michael struggled to pick up the pieces of the estate and Lucy—poor Lucy, who’d had a strained relationship with their parents from the day she was born and they’d decided, oblivious classicists that they were, to name their third child after an archangel in the Bible, same as they had their first two, only the choices remaining were Raphael and Lucifer, and you couldn’t name a girl Raphael, could you?—had packed a bag and hopped a plane and severed all contact, taking what had been a family of five down to just Gabriel and Michael. Gabriel, Michael, and a foundation worth one hundred million dollars.

But Gabriel didn’t tell the bartender any of this, just nodded as though his parents’ graves were right here in Avgonyma, this rump of a village.

He tossed back the rest of his wine, took an obligatory drag on his cigarette, and dropped the coin on the bar. It spun for a second before landing sphinx-side up.

“Know anyone around here who could tell me about this?” Gabriel said. “Specifically, any connection between this sphinx of yours and the one in Egypt.”

He saw the bartender’s face pale. The man shook his head quickly. “You don’t want to ask about this, my friend.”

“Why not?” Gabriel said, reaching out to pick up the coin again. Another hand came down heavily on top of his, pinning his to the wood.

Looking to his right, Gabriel saw that the man beside him was standing now, though none too steadily. The other man at the bar got up, too.

“We don’t talk about the sphinx with nobody, American.” The man pressed down on Gabriel’s hand, grinding it into the bar. “You people just don’t listen, do you?”

Chapter 11

“‘You people’?” Gabriel said. “Has someone else been asking?”

The man turned to his neighbor, barked out a nasty laugh. “Has someone else…?” Turning back, he swung a fist at Gabriel’s head. Gabriel ducked under it and wrenched his hand free. He jammed the coin in his pocket.

“Don’t start trouble, Niko,” the bartender said, “please. Demetria just cleaned the place—”

“Quiet,” Niko roared and barreled forward, his arms wrapping around Gabriel’s torso and bearing both of them toward the stone wall. Gabriel snatched a half-full glass off the bar as they passed and smashed it into the back of Niko’s head. It got Niko to release his grappling hold but only momentarily while he raked bits of glass and flecks of foam out of his thick mat of hair.

Meanwhile, a young man who shared the bartender’s complexion got up from a nearby table. “Who are you to tell my father to be quiet in his own place?” He came forward.

“Christos, don’t,” the bartender said, patting the air with one hand placatingly.

“No, Papa, this loudmouth can’t talk to you this way, not in front of me.”

“You just say that,” Niko said, “because you like the color of the Americans’ money. Show them around the island, take them anywhere they want, tell them anything they want—they feel lonely at night, you get down on your knees for them, too?”

Christos was at the bar in two strides, swinging wildly, but Niko put up his left arm to block the blow, and the man behind him grabbed hold of Christos’ other arm.

“Let him go,” Gabriel said.

“Or what, American?”

Gabriel’s hand dropped to his holster. But before he could get it open, someone leaped on his back from behind.

Gabriel didn’t see the free-for-all begin—his face was pressed into the dirt floor. But he could hear it going on above him, the sound of punches landing and glass breaking. He raised one elbow sharply, taking out the man lying on top of him, and rolled over, springing to his feet. He jumped back to get out of the path of one enraged Greek who’d found a cudgel somewhere and was swinging it wildly over his head as he charged the bar. The bartender was nowhere in sight, having either dropped behind the bar for safety or run out into the street for help.

Spotting Christos in the swarm of angry men, Gabriel began making his way toward him, pushing the bodies of combatants to either side. If this Christos was favorably disposed toward Americans and inclined to answer their questions, that made him someone Gabriel needed to talk to before a blow from one his fellow countrymen put him into traction, or worse.

His view was blocked for a moment as someone leapt down from halfway up the staircase to the second floor, the bottom half of of his face smeared with blood. But it wasn’t Gabriel he was interested in, and they both darted left, and then right, and then left again, trying to get out of each other’s way. Finally Gabriel stopped and stood still, his arms at his sides, and the man ran past, shouting his thanks as he went.

With this gory specter out of his path Gabriel saw Christos again, held between two larger men, each spreading one of his arms wide while Niko lifted a wooden chair and swung it back over one shoulder.

Gabriel got to Niko just as the man completed his backswing. He plucked the chair out of Niko’s hands as he was about to bring it down. Niko spun, dumbfounded at finding himself empty-handed. Gabriel gave the chair back to him, full in the face, the wood of the chair’s back splintering when it connected with the big man’s jaw. Niko slumped to the ground. Gabriel dropped the remnants of the chair and finally drew his Colt.

“Let him go,” he told the men holding onto Christos’ arms. “Yes, you.” He gestured with the gun. The men backed away, hands up in the eternal gesture of surrender. He could have had their wallets if he’d wanted them.

“You,” he said, pointing to the one with smaller feet. “Take those off.”

“My shoes?” the man said.

“Off,” Gabriel repeated, and he accepted the soft gum-soled loafers with his other hand. He jammed them into his jacket pocket. They’d do.

“Thank you—” Christos began, but Gabriel cut him off.

“Later. What’s the safest way out of here?”

Christos led him behind the bar, where a wooden panel set into the floor came up when he pulled on the iron ring in its center. A ladder led down to a cellar, and at the bottom they found the bartender, sitting on an empty wine crate, playing solitaire with a filthy, creased deck of cards. “You see what you started, Christos?”

“I didn’t start it, Papa, Niko did.”

The old man shrugged. “Nobody ever starts it. But who’s left to clean up when it’s finished? Eh?”

“I’ll clean up, Papa.”

“You! That’ll be the day. Go on. Get your American out of here before they take him to pieces.”

Gabriel reached into his pocket, took out a few of the hundred-dollar bills he had left, laid them down beside the king and queen of spades. “I apologize for the trouble.”

“Feh,” the bartender said, and spat on the ground, but he kept the money.

They came up into a rear courtyard behind the tavern building. Christos had a green-and-white papakia—a souped-up moped—leaning against the wall. The long, narrow padded seat had room for two and Gabriel climbed on behind him, holding onto the young man’s waist. He saw a purple knot swelling up on Christos’ neck where one of the bar’s other patrons had landed a blow. It was ugly and looked painful—but things could’ve gotten a lot worse, Gabriel told himself. They were lucky to be leaving when they were.

Christos revved the engine and they zoomed off. Two sharp right turns brought them to a steeply rising road through the mountains. Christos seemed to know where he was headed, and Gabriel left him alone to concentrate on driving—until he heard the sound of engines coming up behind them.

“Can this thing go any faster?” he asked. In front of him, Christos shook his head.

Had they been spotted leaving the tavern? There’d been several more of the mopeds leaning against the wall, and certainly some of the brawlers they’d left behind might have been mad enough to follow if they’d seen their prey getting away. Maybe even the man he’d left standing in his socks.

But looking back over his shoulder, Gabriel saw not more papakias come into view but a trio of Ducati Multistrada motorcycles, low to the ground and Corvette red. And their helmeted, black-jacketed drivers were a far cry from the rustics who’d bloodied each other for sport back in the bar.

One of them drew the long barrel of a rifle from a side-mounted holster on his bike’s chassis and fired two shots in their direction.

Christos swerved across the opposite lane and back again, tilting the papakia at a precarious angle.

“Don’t worry,” he shouted back, and then, switching to English, “I drive good—like your Steve McQueen!”

“Great,” Gabriel said, pulling his gun. Steve McQueen. He twisted in his seat, aimed carefully at the lead driver behind them and pulled the trigger just as Christos swerved wildly again. The shot went wide.

“Damn it, kid, I’ve only got three bullets left,” Gabriel said.

The bikes were gaining on them, their engines growling as they accelerated. The driver with the rifle was raising his gun again. Gabriel did the same.

“Keep steady this time,” Gabriel said, “or I’ll save the last one for you.”

“But there’s a turn coming up!” Christos said.

“Fine,” Gabriel said and squeezed the trigger. The driver went off his bike backwards, the faceplate of his helmet shattered. His rifle spun end over end into the brush on the side of the road.

Christos leaned into the turn, an almost 180-degree switchback zigzagging up the mountainous terrain. Gabriel had to strain to hold on.

The two remaining cycles stayed with them through the turn. Neither of the drivers had rifles, but as Gabriel watched, they both pulled out semiautomatic pistols.

“We’ve got to lose these guys,” Gabriel shouted.

“Hold on,” Christos said and, turning off the road, plowed through a field of scrub. The spiny undergrowth tore at Gabriel’s ankles and every few feet a rock under their tires threatened to overturn them.

The other bikes were still on their tail.

A bullet flew past just inches away.

The field angled upward before them, a sloping incline, hilly but empty, not a boulder to hide behind, not a tree.

“How’s this helping us?” Gabriel shouted.

Without warning, Christos braked. Gabriel slid forward, slamming into Christos’ back, and the papakia itself juddered ahead a few feet. The bikes behind them shot past, steering to either side of them to avoid a collision. They began parallel turns that would bring them around again—and then as they passed the crest of the next hill over, they vanished from sight. The sound of metal tearing and twisting and smashing against rock reached them from what sounded like far below. Gabriel jumped off the bike and ran forward, slowing as he got to the place where the other men had disappeared. He stopped at the edge of a crevasse, a sudden rocky sinkhole that bisected the field and plunged at least forty feet straight down. The cycles looked to be very near the bottom. The drivers weren’t moving.

Gabriel returned to the bike.

“I grew up just the other side of this field,” Christos said as they got underway again. “Papa, he would tell me, don’t ever drive in there, no matter what. But I didn’t listen. None of us boys did. We all dared each other, who could go the closest. We could find the edge with our eyes closed.”

“I guess those guys didn’t grow up here,” Gabriel said.

“I guess not,” Christos said.

They were back on the road, chugging up the side of the mountain once more.

“How do you think those guys got on our tail?” Gabriel asked.

Sitting in front of him, Christos shrugged. “Someone must have called them, told them there was a man asking questions about a sphinx.”

“They tell you to keep an eye out for that?”

“Mm-hm,” Christos said. “Said they’d pay, too. Fifty dollars U.S. for any tip, no questions asked.”

“That’s a pretty good deal,” Gabriel said.

“It is.”

“Yet, instead of taking them up on it yourself, you just led them over a cliff.”

“That’s not a cliff,” Christos said.

“They’re just as dead,” Gabriel said. “Why’d you do it? Why not turn me in for the money?”

Christos thought about it for a moment. “You gave my father three hundred dollars when you didn’t have to. I’m not going to turn you in for fifty.”

“What if they offer four hundred?”

Christos looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “We’ll see.”

The miles peeled away beneath their tires and the view the road commanded became more spectacular as their elevation rose.

“Where are we going?” Gabriel finally asked.

“Anavatos,” Christos said. “To see a man named Tigranes.”

“I thought Anavatos was deserted.”

“Almost,” Christos said. “Still a few people live there.”

“And this Tigranes, he knows something about the history of Chios’ sphinxes?”

“Oh, yes,” Christos said.

“Did you take the others to see him,” Gabriel asked, “the other Americans?”

“I tried,” Christos said. “And the Hungarian they worked for, too.” Gabriel’s hands tensed. “But he wouldn’t talk to them. Just plain refused.”

“I see. And why do you think he’ll talk to me? Because I pay better?”

“No—Tigranes doesn’t care about money. He wouldn’t live in Anavatos if he did.”

“Then why?”

“For one thing, you speak our language,” Christos said.

“That means something to him?” Gabriel said.

“That means everything to him,” Christos said.

Chapter 12

Anavatos crowned the mountain they’d been ascending, a cluttered, half-ruined collection of cheek-to-jowl stone buildings that made the buildings of Avgonyma look modern by comparison. The only way in was through a steep and winding road that twisted back on itself several times before arriving. The town’s name meant “unreachable” or “inaccessible,” and never had a place been more appropriately named, Gabriel thought, except maybe Dull, Texas. Built into the mountain, Anavatos was also sometimes called “the invisible city”—if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never see it from below, which is why Chians had used it as a hideout or refuge for centuries. This lasted until 1822, when a siege by the Turks had ended in a mass suicide, with the residents of Anavatos plunging to their deaths off the mountain rather than be taken alive. It had been deserted ever since, a ghost town in the most literal sense.

The streets, as they entered, were completely empty—not even an old woman, not even a cat. Christos drove through them with the confidence of one who knew where he was going and Gabriel let himself be led. He thought briefly about Christos’ earlier remark when asked if his allegiance could be bought for $400—We’ll see—but decided Christos wouldn’t have joked about it if he were really leading Gabriel into a trap. He was a local kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, not someone polished in the art of deceit. And even if Gabriel were wrong about this…well, it was too late to do anything about it now.

Gabriel held on till Christos pulled up in front of a two-story building whose stones looked scrofulous with age and wear. There were openings in the walls, but it was an exaggeration to call them windows; there was no glass in them, certainly. And in lieu of a door there was only an uneven archway.

They dismounted and Christos shouted up, cupping both hands around his mouth. “Sir! It’s Christos Anninos. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

No response was shouted back—but after a moment the silence was broken by the sound of a pair of sandals slapping against stone steps.

The man who emerged from the doorway brought the word antique to mind, not only because he was elderly—though he was that, his face and hands seamed with countless wrinkles, his hair tumbling gray and untrimmed down to his shoulders, a shaggy white beard resting on his chest—but also because he wore a wool chiton, fastened at the shoulder with a metal clasp and flat sandals held on with straps of knotted leather. He looked like something out of a museum diorama.

In the crook of one arm, he was carrying a U-shaped wooden frame with four strings threaded from a crossbar down to the base of the U—a sort of miniature harp that was just the touch needed to complete the picture of an ancient Greek bard. They might have interrupted him while he was posing for an illustration for a dictionary, Gabriel thought; or perhaps he was like the men who dress up in plastic gladiator outfits and hang around the Coliseum in Rome, bumming cigarettes from tourists and hoping to score a dollar or two posing for photographs. This was Gabriel’s first impression, and he cursed himself for having hoped that this local youth might bring him to someone with genuine knowledge of the island’s past.

But looking again in each man’s eyes, Gabriel saw no sign of a put-on; both seemed in earnest, and Christos in particular had assumed an attitude of respect and deference entirely at odds with his earlier manner when racing up here on the bike. And taking another glance at the old man’s attire, Gabriel saw how far from a polished, plastic simulation of antiquity it was; also, how protectively the man cradled his clearly handmade instrument, how worn the bridge was and how calloused were his fingertips. He actually played the thing, apparently. He might well be a lunatic, living out here in an empty town on the top of a mountain—but he did not seem a charlatan.

Tigranes, meanwhile, took a similarly detailed survey of Gabriel, gazing critically at him from head to toe and, unlike Gabriel, looking progressively less satisfied with what he saw as his assessment went on. He frowned at the leather jacket and the frown deepened when he got to the holster poking out at the bottom.

“Another?” The old man’s voice was low and quiet, almost a whisper. “You bring another to me who cares nothing for my ancient duty, who cares only to satisfy his demands, who will mock and denigrate what he does not understand?”

“No—” Christos began, but Gabriel stepped forward, put a hand on the boy’s arm to silence him. Perhaps he was wasting his time—but if, on the other hand, the old man was what he seemed, Gabriel did not want to get turned away at the door as the Americans working for DeGroet had been.

“Honored father,” he said, in Greek, “I do not have the privilege of knowing you, but I promise, I mock nothing of the ancient world. I am a student of the ancient ways and hold them in the highest respect.”

Tigranes eyed him warily.

“Your instrument,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward the harp, “is it a phorminx or a kithara? It’s not a barbitos, I don’t think…is it?”

Tigranes continued staring at him, his heavy eyelids narrowing to slits. “Of course it is not a barbitos,” he said, finally. “I am no woman, playing melodies for the pleasure of the household.”

“Then it is a phorminx?” Gabriel pressed.

“Yes,” Tigranes said grudgingly. “It is a phorminx.”

“And do you…use it?”

“To play merry refrains, you mean?” Tigranes said. “For visitors to dance and drink to? Is this what you have in mind, young man?”

“Of course not,” Gabriel said. “That would be an insult to the instrument. You don’t dance to the music of the phorminx—you declaim heroic poetry.”

Tigranes’ eyes widened at this, and he looked to Christos, who nodded.

“Come upstairs,” Tigranes said.

The man’s living quarters were as austere as the building’s exterior would lead one to expect. There were no signs of electricity or other modern conveniences. Through a rear window in what clearly served as Tigranes’ bedroom Gabriel saw a privy out back; in one corner of the room he saw a clay pitcher resting by a straw pallet. This room occupied roughly half of the second floor. Passing through it, Gabriel reached an even emptier sitting room whose only furnishings were drawn on the wall, a crude mural in the Attic style of a young man reclining on a bench before a seated, older man holding a lyre.

Tigranes sat cross-legged on the floor and Gabriel followed suit. Christos discreetly remained in the room outside.

“What is that picture?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the mural.

“That,” Tigranes said, “is my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. Fifty grandfathers ago.”

“He was a bard?” Gabriel said, using the ancient term for it: rhapsode, one who sews stories together.

“All the men in my family have been bards,” Tigranes said, but he used a term more ancient still: aoidos. “From the earliest of days to the present.”

“Here on Chios?”

Tigranes nodded, but said no more.

“And your…ancestor,” Gabriel said, reaching for a way to draw the old man out, “he…taught pupils?”

“My ancestor did teach a pupil,” Tigranes said. “His son. And his son taught his son, and so on. But you misunderstand what you see here. He is not the teacher in this picture.” He patted the wall by the image of the boy on the bench. “The young man—that is my ancestor.”

“I see,” Gabriel said. “And who is the old man teaching him?”

“Homer,” Tigranes said.

Chapter 13

“Homer,” Gabriel said.

“Homeros, the prince of the aoidi, yes—you did not know he was from Chios?”

Gabriel knew that Chios was one of several places in the region that laid claim to being the birthplace of Homer—it was the Mediterranean’s answer to George Washington slept here.

“I…I did not,” Gabriel said.

“Have you never seen the Daskalopetra? The throne from which Homer taught? It is beside the beach at Vrontados.”

He’d seen it, on one previous visit—a jutting stub of stone overlooking the sea. Any man might have sat there, or no man might; none but sea birds rested on it now.

“From father to son for twenty-eight hundred years,” Tigranes said, “the words of Homer have passed, a sacred trust. The stories of Achilleus and Odysseus and Oedipus—”

“Oedipus?” Gabriel said, and Tigranes nodded. He said: “My father taught me as his father taught him, the sixteen thousand verses of the Iliad, the twelve thousand of the Odyssey, and the seven thousand of the Oedipodea.” He drew a clawlike hand across the strings of his phorminx and an ancient chord hung in the air. “Sing, muse, the passion and hubris of Oedipus of Thebes, unhappiest of mortals, whose fate was writ before his birth…”

As he continued reciting the poem, line after line of hexameter spilling forth, Gabriel felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. It was the same feeling he got when walking into a sealed tomb for the first time, entering a place no man had set foot for centuries; or holding in his hands an artifact believed lost forever—which, after a fashion, is what this was. You could buy a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey in any bookstore, in any language, in any country on the face of the earth. You could find it, god help you, in bits and pixels on the Internet. But the Oedipodea was one of the lost works of the ancient world, the only known written copy having been destroyed in the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

“It’s…beautiful,” Gabriel said when Tigranes reached the end of the introductory apostrophe and paused for breath. “And you say it is the work of Homer? I thought I remembered the Oedipodea being credited to someone else.”

Tigranes made a disgusted sound. “Cinaethon of Sparta,” he said, scoffing, “that’s what Pausanias said. And Plutarch. But what did they know? Did their fathers learn it at the feet of the poet himself?”

Gabriel understood now why Christos had brought him here. This was not the improvisation of a madman on a mountaintop—even the portion he had heard so far had the authenticity and coherence of a genuine artifact, a traditional lyric learned by rote as one might memorize and transmit a liturgy, from mind to mind and voice to voice across a sea of generations. It was a record of a forgotten time, one that very likely existed nowhere in the world but in this old man’s head. And it was a record with a particular relevance to the question he had posed in the tavern, since whether by Cinaethon or by Homer the Oedipodea would have told the story of Oedipus’ life—ending, famously, with his killing his father, marrying his mother, and putting his own eyes out when he learned what he had done…but beginning, just as famously, with his triumph over one of Greece’s most ancient monsters, the riddle-posing sphinx.

“Do you,” Gabriel began, “do you know the whole thing? All seven thousand verses?”

Tigranes’ eyes blazed and his chin rose haughtily. “All seven thousand! Of course!” He passed a hand before his eyes. “It is my duty to remember. Until the day I die.” His voice fell, taking on a tone of sadness. “I repeat them daily, though only to myself now. For I have no son, no one to teach. They will die with me. But not,” he said, rousing some fire again, “a day sooner.”

“I would greatly like to hear the rest,” Gabriel said.

“Then prepare yourself,” the old man said, his voice dropping into a rehearsed cadence, rich in timbre and suffused with pride, “for a story of four nights’ telling, an adventure unlike any you have heard before, for four nights of bloody deeds and terrible loss, of men brave and desperate, of women cruelly shamed.” His hand played among the strings of his phorminx, and the air jangled with a dissonant tune that spoke of distant shores, of men struggling under the heat of a foreign sun. “Prepare for four nights of splendor and depravity, four nights of—”

Christos’ voice interrupted then from the other room, where he was standing at the window. “Better make it four minutes,” he said. “We’ve got company.”

“Excuse me,” Gabriel said. He rushed to the window. Through it he saw the alleyway behind Tigranes’ home and the rooftops of the one-story buildings clustered around. Past those, he could see a sliver of the entry path leading into Anavatos, and, as they passed, the men coming up along it. Walking two abreast, it looked like a latter-day siege force: a dozen men at least, all armed, and bringing up the rear, standing a foot taller than any of the others, a man Gabriel had hoped never to see again. Andras.

Gabriel ducked out of sight, drew Christos close. “Is there any way out of here other than the way we came in?”

“Out of the building or out of Anavatos?”

“Either.”

“No,” Christos said.

“There has to be another way out of the building,” Gabriel said. “There always is.” He looked around. “We can go out the window.”

“With an eighty-year-old man?” Christos said. “We can’t leave Tigranes here. They’d torture him to make him talk. They’d kill him.”

Gabriel ran into the other room, where Tigranes still sat, one hand poised over the strings. The expression on his face said how little he liked being interrupted once he’d begun declaiming, but that he was prepared to forgive all if Gabriel apologized and quietly returned to his seat. Well, he could have his apology, but the rest would have to wait.

“Honored father,” Gabriel said, putting one hand under Tigranes’ elbow and lifting him to his feet, “I regret that we won’t be able to properly begin the Oedipodea yet. There are some men on their way, and we can’t let them find us here.”

“Take your hands off me,” Tigranes said, and Gabriel released his arm. The old man smoothed down his chiton.

“We’ve got a few minutes at most,” Christos said.

“You wish to avoid these men?” Tigranes said.

“We have to,” Gabriel said.

“Very well. Follow me.” And Tigranes headed down the stairs, his sandals slapping against the stone once more.

At the ground floor, he led them past the open front archway (Gabriel glanced outside: no men in sight, not yet), to a small chamber at the far wall. A closet, really—they could barely all fit inside and there was no door to it. As soon as anyone entered the building they’d be seen.

“This is no good,” Gabriel said, turning to Tigranes, but Tigranes wasn’t there.

Christos and Gabriel looked at each other, baffled—the old man, who had been standing behind them, had vanished somehow while they weren’t looking. Then they heard the slap of his sandals overhead.

Gabriel looked up. There was no ceiling to the closet, and Tigranes was ten feet up, climbing the wall using hand- and toeholds carved into the stone like the rungs of a ladder, the phorminx hanging across his back from a leather strap. He was moving quickly; for an octogenarian, the man was remarkably spry.

Gabriel gestured for Christos to go up next, and while the young man did, Gabriel drew his Colt. From the street outside he heard voices. The men were talking, in Greek.

So Andras had rounded up some local talent this time.

Then he heard Andras himself, speaking English, telling them to shut the hell up. And in the quiet that fell he heard one gun after another being armed.

He looked up. Christos was ten feet overhead now and Tigranes was nowhere to be seen. As Gabriel watched, he saw the upper half of Christos’ body vanish as well—into what he could only assume, since he couldn’t see it from below, was a hole in the wall separating this building from the one beside it.

“Old man!” came a shout from the street. “Come out and talk!”

Gabriel holstered his pistol and began climbing.

“We will count to three and then we will come in. You don’t want this, Tigranes. It’ll go easier for you if you just come out.”

A moment later the counting began, but Gabriel only heard the first number—Tria!—before he reached the hole Tigranes and Christos had entered and dove into it himself. Christos was in front of him, crawling swiftly on his hands and knees along a stone tunnel, its inner walls the pink and beige of cut sandstone, light coming in through crevices where the ancient mortar had crumbled away. Past him, Gabriel could just make out Tigranes’ chiton-covered rear and the phorminx lying against his back, nearly scraping the ceiling as he crawled.

Judging from the length of the tunnel, it had to pass through quite a few adjacent buildings, turning periodically as the angles of the neighboring houses required. They passed several openings leading down to closets like the one through which they’d entered. Apparently the residents of Anavatos hadn’t relied solely on the inaccessibility of their town for purposes of holding out against a siege—tunnels like these would have helped them resist occupation as well.

Though in the end, of course, it hadn’t been enough. Gabriel did his best not to think about this.

From some distance back they heard, very quietly, the sound of shouting and pounding footsteps.

“Ask him where we get out,” Gabriel whispered to Christos, who passed the question along. He whispered back a moment later: “Next one over.”

Then Christos disappeared around a turn in the tunnel, and when Gabriel made the turn himself he saw Christos and Tigranes both on their knees in a wider chamber with a chimney leading up. “Where does this lead us?” Gabriel asked.

“To the end,” Tigranes said, and started climbing.

Well, that would more or less have to be the answer, Gabriel supposed: there were only so many buildings standing side by side and no tunnel could go on forever. Perhaps there would be a way for them to climb down the wall of the last building and then get behind Andras and his men, sneak back to the road and return on foot back to a more inhabited part of the island…

Gabriel followed Christos up the short shaft of rock and stepped out onto a flat surface. It wasn’t the roof of a building. It was the stony ground at the edge of a cliff.

This was the end, indeed—the end of Anavatos, the edge at which the town’s inhabitants had made their final stand, and from which they had leapt to their deaths. Only one hardy tree grew here, its roots clinging to the rock and dangling over the edge.

“What did you bring us here for?” Gabriel said, looking out over the sheer fall and the rocks far below. “There’s no way out!”

A shout rose in the distance: “Over there! I see them!”

“There is,” Tigranes said, “there is a way—”

“Then you’d better tell us pretty quickly what it is,” Gabriel said. He pulled his gun. Two bullets—damn it, how did he wind up down to two bullets again? And no telling whether they’d even fire…

“Down the mountain,” Tigranes began.

“What,” Christos said, the fear evident in his voice, “climbing down the side?”

“To a point,” Tigranes said.

“Where?” Christos said.

But there was no time for an answer as men rose into view just yards away, arms and legs pumping as they ran toward the dead end where their prey was cornered.

Gabriel pulled the trigger and a gunshot split the air, taking one of the men down. But the others kept coming.

“Get into the tunnel,” he shouted, “we’ve got to go back—” And he made for the opening of the chimney. But before he could get there, a man emerged from it, a short Greek with hair the color of steel wool and a jagged scar across his forehead. The man was holding a gun and he fired it without pausing even to aim, and it was only that overeagerness that saved Gabriel from catching a bullet in the chest. Gabriel threw himself against the man, knocking his gun away and taking him to the ground. But another came up right behind him. This one did take the time to aim, steadying his gun hand carefully while Gabriel and the scarred man grappled on the ground at his feet.

“No!” Christos shouted, and launched himself at the standing gunman, tackling him around the knees. They fell to the ground in a heap, the barrel of the gunman’s pistol just millimeters from where Gabriel lay below the scarred Greek, his throat clutched in the shorter man’s hands. Gabriel’s saw the gunman’s eyes spark with a vicious elation, saw his finger tighten on the trigger—

Desperately, Gabriel rolled over as the gun beside him fired. The explosion was deafening. But it was his enemy’s head the bullet entered, not his own. The man’s hands fell away from his throat and Gabriel staggered to his feet. He kicked the gun out of the other man’s hand while Christos slugged him, hard, in the face.

“Enough!” came a nasal voice and it took Gabriel a moment to realize the word had been spoken in Hungarian, not Greek. He looked up, raising his Colt at the same time. Andras was standing near the edge of the cliff, one meaty arm around Tigranes’ throat, the other holding a pistol to the old man’s temple.

“Drop your gun, Hunt,” Andras said, “or the old man dies.”

“Lajos would skin you alive if you killed him,” Gabriel said. “He’s the only man on earth who knows about the sphinx.”

“What Mr. DeGroet does or doesn’t do is my problem,” Andras said, “not yours. Drop your gun.”

Behind him, Gabriel heard the sound of footsteps racing up to within a yard or two, then pattering to a halt. Five men, six men—who knew how many. Too many. One bullet just wasn’t enough, even if he’d been willing to risk Tigranes’ life. Which he wasn’t.

Gabriel reluctantly released the hammer of his Colt and let it slide from his hand to the ground.

He felt men take hold of each of his elbows roughly, felt his wrists drawn together behind his back, felt a length of rope binding them together. A few feet away, he saw another pair of men take hold of Christos.

Andras came forward, dragging Tigranes with him. He bent to pick up Gabriel’s gun.

“That’s a very nice weapon,” he said. “An antique, isn’t it? I think I’ll keep it.”

“You son of a—” Gabriel started, but Andras slapped him brutally across the face with the side of his Colt. He felt the slash on his cheek from DeGroet’s sword reopen and start bleeding again.

“Take them away,” Andras said, wiping Gabriel’s blood off the cylinder.

Chapter 14

They were being held in Anavatos’ tallest building, a three-story tower near the cliff’s edge that during the town’s heyday had been the site of an olive oil press, a church, and a school. Today it was an empty shell with a few unbroken benches the only reminder of its earlier functions.

From somewhere Andras’ men had found a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, one with arms and one without, and Gabriel and Christos were tied to these, side by side. Tigranes was seated on the ground across the room, facing them, his hands free, his phorminx in his lap.

On a bench against one wall, Gabriel’s Colt lay, tantalizingly out of reach. Andras had placed it there deliberately, Gabriel figured. Just to make a point.

“Tell, old man,” Andras said, his Greek crude and heavily accented. He had a cell phone in his hand and, having dialed it a moment earlier, was holding it out in Tigranes’ direction. DeGroet was on the other end of the line, waiting silently.

When nothing happened, DeGroet’s voice spat from the speaker, thin but clear. “Kill one of them.”

“Which one?” Andras said.

“The Greek,” DeGroet said. “He wouldn’t care about Hunt.”

Andras nodded to the men standing behind Christos’ chair, and one of them drew a foot-long hunting knife from a scabbard at his waist. He held it to Christos’ throat.

“Don’t do it,” Gabriel said, in Greek, to the man. “He’s done nothing wrong. He’s one of you.”

“He chose his side,” the man muttered. His knife didn’t budge.

“Boy,” came DeGroet’s voice, “can you understand me?” His Greek was better than Andras’, though still accented.

“Yes,” Christos said.

“Tell the old man to begin reciting the poem about the sphinx or my men will cut your head off. Tell him that.”

“Tigranes,” Christos said. The old man looked over at him. “You heard what they want.” His voice trembled. “Don’t do it.”

“They will kill you,” Tigranes said.

“Lajos,” Gabriel called out, “you don’t need to do this. I know everything you want to know—I already got it out of him. Bring me to wherever you are and I’ll—”

“Oh, now you wish to cooperate. Imagine that. The great Gabriel Hunt, within an inch of losing his life at last, and now he wants to make a deal. Well, no. I think not. You had your chance—plenty of chances. No more deals. Andras?”

“Yes,” Andras said.

“Start a little at a time,” DeGroet said in Hungarian. “Cut off the boy’s hand. Then the other, then a foot. We’ll make the old man talk.”

Andras nodded again to the man with the knife and explained partly through gestures what DeGroet wanted. It wasn’t a difficult message to convey.

Gabriel, meanwhile, was straining against the ropes holding him to the chair. There was one around his wrists and another tying his ankles to the front legs, and both were taut and unyielding. With enough time and privacy he might be able to introduce some slack, work the knots apart, maybe even inch over to the wall and work the ropes against the rock till the fibers came apart—but time and privacy were two things he didn’t have.

One of the men untied Christos’ arms and then held them pinned to the wooden arms of the chair. The other, the one with the knife, said to Christos, “You right-handed or left? I’ll do the other first.”

“No,” Tigranes said. “No. I cannot sit by while this boy is maimed or killed. Not when all you wish is to hear my poems. I will play.” Angrily, he strummed his instrument, and the melody that arose sounded dark, martial.

“There,” DeGroet’s voice came from the cell phone. “You see?”

“Raise your voice in song, O goddess,” Tigranes intoned, “and tell of Peleus’ mighty son, Achilleus, who rained misery untold upon the brows of his fellow Achaeans. Many a hero among them was laid low and brought to Hades, their flesh made carrion for the beaks of vultures and the jaws of wild dogs upon the blood-drenched plains of Troy—”

DeGroet interrupted, his voice blasting from the tiny speaker in Andras’ hand: “Troy? Troy? I don’t want the Iliad, you old fool, I want the sphinx—”

“I am very sorry,” Tigranes said, his voice soft, his music stilled, “but I am, as you say, old. My memory is not what it was. I cannot enter the old tales anywhere I wish, or that you might wish—I can only remember them from the beginning.”

“You’re joking,” DeGroet said.

“From the beginning,” Tigranes repeated. “And that means I have to start on the plains of Troy. And if I am interrupted, I will have to return to the plains of Troy once more, and start over again. From the beginning.”

“I will have them kill the boy!” DeGroet shouted.

“You can kill whomever you wish,” Tigranes said. “Him, me, yourself. But it will not change the fact that I can only tell the stories in one way: from start to finish, in their proper order.”

DeGroet uttered an oath, a fevered Hungarian profanity. The language was rich with them.

“All right,” he said finally. “Do it in whatever order you have to, but for god’s sake, do it quickly.”

“For the gods’ sake,” Tigranes said, “I will do properly.”

“Just start already,” DeGroet said. “Andras—call me back when he gets to the sphinx.” And the connection was broken.

“You heard him,” Andras said, pocketing the phone. He looked around the room, the expression on his face making it clear that he’d have to be tied to a chair himself in order to sit through hours of Greek poetry being recited. “Start,” he said. “And you—” He pointed to the man with the knife. “Say me when he reaches the sphinx. I go up.” He strode out and they all heard his steps on the stairs.

“Sit, gentlemen, sit,” Tigranes said, gesturing to their captors, Greek men all, ranging in age from their late twenties to a few in what looked like their late fifties. “We will be here for a while, you may as well be comfortable.” Some of the men sat; some remained standing. Tigranes smiled at them. “You know that Homer himself was once a captive, a hostage—it is from this experience that he got his name, homeros. He had another name at birth. You did not know this?” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You should be ashamed to know so little of your own heritage.”

“Stop talking and begin reciting,” the man with the knife said. “We don’t want to be here all night.”

Tigranes shrugged. “As you wish.”

His fingers plucked at the strings.

Two hours later, Tigranes had reached the bedroom of Helen of Troy and all the men sat at rapt attention. Their eyes were on Tigranes as he sang of her treachery and sadness, of her lover, Paris, and his cowardice, of their dalliance between the sheets while men were dying for them by the score on the battlefield below. His hands alternated between plucking the strings of his lyre and waving in midair to accompany the vivid word pictures he was painting. His voice grew quiet during moments of grieving and loud for the bloody battles, sped up when events took an unexpected turn and lingered painfully when a hero’s fatal wounds bled into the Trojan soil.

Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw that Christos was mesmerized as well: he didn’t seem anxious for himself any longer, only for the fate of Hector and Ajax and Odysseus. As Gabriel himself might have been—Tigranes was an oddly compelling performer, and there might never be another opportunity to hear the Iliad recited in this way, as it was originally meant to be heard. But he had other priorities. He nudged Christos’ leg gently with his knee.

It took two more nudges to break the spell. Then Christos looked over. Gabriel jerked his head back very slightly and cast his eyes downward, toward Christos’ hands. The man with the knife had retied them behind his back, but he’d done it swiftly—Tigranes’ tale had been underway and he’d been half listening to it already. Perhaps he’d done slightly less thorough a job the second time, had left a bit more slack.

Gabriel’s arms were also tied behind his back, and he strained now, stretching as far as the ropes would permit over toward Christos. And after a moment or two Christos got the message and started straining back the other way. Gabriel felt the skin of the younger man’s knuckles brush against his own, then they were gone. He redoubled his efforts. He could feel it painfully in his shoulders and elbows, stretched almost to the point of dislocation, and he could see the boy beside him wincing as he tried to meet him more than halfway.

Then Gabriel felt a knot beneath his fingertips.

He seized it, pinched it between forefinger and thumb, grabbed hold and pulled the rope toward him, and Christos’ hands with it. Christos took in a sharp breath, bit down on his lower lip. Gabriel saw sweat bead on Christos’ forehead, saw the pain in his eyes, but Gabriel held on and mouthed two words: Untie me.

Christos blinked tears out of his eyes and nodded, and then his fingers began moving, his nails picking at the rope binding Gabriel’s wrists. Gabriel, meanwhile, concentrated on not letting the rope out of his increasingly sweaty grip—if he lost his hold and Christos’ hands swung away, Christos might not have the strength to get them back over here again.

Facing them across the room, Tigranes saw what they were doing, or suspected, anyway, and he redoubled his efforts. He stood up, braced the phorminx against his chest with one arm and swept the other in grand theatrical gestures, miming the swing of a sword, a man warding off blows, a wife wiping her husband’s battle-weary brow. His beard shook with passion, and the Greeks seated in double rows on the floor and benches before him never looked away.

Half a minute more, a minute—and then finally the rope came free. It slipped from Gabriel’s wrists to the floor and he felt blood rush back in where the circulation had been cut off. He flexed his fingers, one hand at a time, then went to work on the rope around Christos’ wrists. When that fell to the ground he cautiously reached down to work on the knots at his ankles.

He’d gotten one leg free when heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs outside the door. He and Christos looked at each other. Sitting upright again, they slid their hands behind them, doing their best to look as though they were still tied down.

“Sphinx yet?” Andras asked, barging into the room.

The men all roused, as if from sleep, looking around with a slightly embarrassed expression. Tigranes stopped his song, the last of his notes hanging still in the air. “Not yet,” he said. “Now go, before you make me lose my place.”

Andras’ huge fist rose and he advanced on Tigranes for a step or two, forgetting himself—he was not used to being talked back to by a man twice his age and half his size. But the buzzing of the cell phone in his pocket reminded him of the fate in store for him if he lost his temper. All eyes were on him as he took the phone out and flipped it open, held it to his ear. “No, not yet,” he said. “I will. I will. Yes, sir.” He jabbed the “END” button with his thumb—and then Gabriel smashed him across the back with the chair.

Chapter 15

Andras fell forward onto two of the other men as Gabriel leapt for the bench with his gun on it. He slid across the surface on his belly and snapped the revolver up in one fist, spinning to face Andras as he went off the end of the bench and landed in a crouch.

Christos had taken off the rope around his ankles as well. He ran over to Tigranes and began shepherding him toward Gabriel. He put the old man behind him, protecting him from the blows two of the other Greeks began raining down, getting in a punch of his own whenever one of the midsections before him was unprotected.

“Step back,” Gabriel ordered Andras, who’d climbed to his feet once more. The cell phone was still in his hand, its screen broken now, its top half hanging at a crooked angle. He threw it at Gabriel and reached for the gun at his hip.

“Uh-uh,” Gabriel said, catching the ruined phone in his free hand and pulling the Colt’s hammer back. “Hands up by your shoulders.”

Andras sneered, disgusted—but he put his hands up.

Gabriel moved toward the room’s one window, inching along the wall so no man could get behind him. He fanned the Colt left and right in tight arcs, sending each man who’d dared to venture a step forward shrinking back. He saw Christos inching toward him from the other direction, Tigranes shielded behind his broad shoulders. “Let him through,” Gabriel said, and the men pressing around Christos fell back a step or two, their hands up, as Gabriel’s gun swept over to cover them.

“You’re a fool,” Andras said as Gabriel and Christos closed in from either side on the window, a narrow arched opening in the tower wall that looked out over a rear courtyard. “Where are you going to go?” They were on the ground floor, so even Tigranes could go out the window here—but ten yards away was the cliff where they’d been captured, and past it, nothing but open sky.

“What, are you going to jump,” Andras said, “like those old Greeks did? Kill yourself to get away?”

“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Like someone once told me, what I do or don’t do is my problem, not yours.”

“Kill yourself if you want, Hunt—I don’t care. But if you take the old man, that makes it my problem. My boss is not the sort of man you want to disappoint. He can be very nasty when someone disappoints him.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Gabriel said. Beside him, out of the corner of one eye, he saw Christos climbing out the window, then reaching back in to help Tigranes through.

Andras darted an involuntary glance down toward where his gun hung at his side. Gabriel knew what he was thinking: could he get to it in time?

“Don’t do it, Andras,” Gabriel said.

“You’re going to have to leave the old man here, Hunt,” Andras said. “I don’t like the idea of being cut into little pieces by Lajos DeGroet.” And he went for his gun.

He managed to get it out of its holster before Gabriel pulled the trigger. Andras spun toward the wall and collapsed, Gabriel’s last bullet in his chest. “Well,” Gabriel said softly, “you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

The Greeks stood around for a moment in stunned silence, the man who’d been paying them and giving them their orders lying lifeless at their feet. Gabriel took the opportunity to vault over the sill of the window and into the courtyard. He hit the ground running. Christos and Tigranes were already twenty feet away, speeding for the cliff’s edge as fast as Tigranes could go. Which was pretty fast, Gabriel was happy to see.

Would the Greeks follow? They had no real reason to—he’d have thought they’d have had more loyalty to a couple of their countrymen than to Andras and DeGroet.

But a moment later the question was answered. A chorus of angry voices arose behind them and then gunfire followed as the Greeks poured out the window and gave chase.

He hastened to the edge of the cliff, where Tigranes and Christos were on their hands and knees, facing away from the vertiginous drop. Tigranes had his phorminx slung across his back once more and his tough, gnarled hands wrapped tightly around a brown root, similarly tough and gnarled, that trailed across the ground and over the edge. “Follow me closely,” he said. “We are only going a short distance down.”

“I certainly hope we are,” Gabriel said, looking at the long fall to the mountain’s base.

“Hold tight,” Tigranes said and, letting himself down the root hand over hand, dropped out of sight. Christos looked up at Gabriel nervously and then followed suit, holding onto a neighboring root. That left Gabriel by himself on the clifftop—but not for long, since the first of the men who’d pursued them from the tower was upon him in seconds.

It was the man with the knife, and he swung its blade before him, back and forth in wide sweeps, like a thresher looking for wheat to cut down to size.

“Where are they?” he shouted.

“Gone,” Gabriel said, stepping back to stay out of the blade’s reach. “Over the side.” With each step backwards he took, the other man took one forward, matching him stride for stride. And there wasn’t much striding room left.

“You lie,” the man said. Then, looking down at the ground, he saw one of the roots shift slightly, as though under a heavy burden. “Or…maybe you don’t,” he said. “An old man, hanging like a child from a tree limb.” His voice rose to a shout. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Tigranes!” He raised his knife overhead and brought his arm down forcefully, releasing the blade so that it plunged downward and landed, quivering, in the center of the root. It was the thinnest of the roots, and it split as the blade went in. The severed portion snaked toward the edge of the cliff. Gabriel leaped after it, skidding along the ground and grabbing hold of the root just as it plunged over the edge. But when he grabbed it, he found it weighed practically nothing—and looking down he saw there was no one holding onto the other end.

He heard a sound beside him—hsst!—and turned his head to see Christos just inches away, clinging desperately to the next root over. Tigranes was hanging onto one a few feet further down the rock face, his sandaled feet twined in its length, one hand feeling for something among the rocks beside him.

“Now you, American,” came a voice from behind him, and Gabriel felt hands at his ankles, lifting his feet high in the air and tilting him forward. “You can join them.”

Gabriel dropped the cut root and scrabbled with his hands at the rock before him, but he couldn’t get a grip as the Greek behind him tipped him over. His chest slid roughly down the stone surface till he was hanging headfirst, arms dangling toward the ground far below.

Looking to the side where Christos and Tigranes were, he saw the strangest thing then: Tigranes, who had continued feeling among the edges and protrusions of the cliff’s face, apparently found what he’d been hunting for and, reaching with one arm and one leg, he pulled himself over to it—and vanished. The root he’d been hanging on swung back toward Christos, empty.

Above him, Gabriel heard another Greek voice back on the clifftop shouting breathlessly, “Don’t do it! Don’t let him go! The Hungarian wanted them alive!”

“Not this one,” said the man holding onto Gabriel’s boots—but he kept holding on, for now. “He wanted the old man. This one he was happy to see dead.”

“Still,” the other Greek said, uncertainty creeping into his voice.

Beside him, Gabriel saw Christos nervously reach out for the root that Tigranes had vacated. Carefully, oh so carefully, he shifted his weight over to it and slid down its length to where Tigranes had been feeling around the rocks.

Meanwhile, the argument continued overhead.

“You want him? You hold him,” the man with his hands on Gabriel’s ankles said.

“I don’t want him,” the other man said.

“You don’t want him? I don’t want him. Andras didn’t want him. No one wants him. You hear that?” the man shouted down at Gabriel. “No one wants you. Goodbye, American.” And he gave Gabriel’s ankles a heave toward the sea, letting go when they were out over the edge.

As he fell, Gabriel reached out desperately for the root Christos had been hanging from. He grabbed hold of it at the very bottom, turning end over end till he was hanging upright. His momentum carried him bruisingly into the rock, but he held on tight, his fingers clenching for all they were worth.

But the momentum had been transmitted along the length of the root and had not gone unnoticed overhead.

“Son of a bitch,” came the Greek’s voice, and Gabriel heard him walking over to where he’d left the knife. A moment later, Gabriel felt the root he was hanging from shift downward as the man started hacking at it.

Below him, he saw Christos feeling among the rocks where Tigranes had disappeared. A gnarled, clawlike hand popped out from behind one of the protrusions on the cliff’s surface, took hold of Christos’ forearm, and pulled him toward itself.

This root was thicker and wouldn’t part quite as easily as the last one—Gabriel heard the sounds of hacking overhead replaced with sawing, the knife’s serrated blade biting into the thick tendril. With each stroke, he felt the root’s purchase on the cliff’s surface become weaker.

Christos was stretching out a leg now, as Tigranes had.

Gabriel braced his feet against the cliff wall. He’d only have one shot at this—

Christos vanished behind the same outjutting stretch of rock Tigranes had, and the root he’d been hanging from swung back, liberated from his weight. At that instant the root from which Gabriel was hanging was liberated, too, from the trunk of the tree it had supported for a century or more. Gabriel kicked off with both feet and, reaching out, seized hold of the swinging root as it came toward him.

His palms were slick with sweat and raw with abrasions. He slid down the root, trying to cling, straining to hold on, finally getting a good grip only inches from the end. He was breathing heavily, rapidly, his heart hammering in his chest. Beneath his boots, he saw the hundreds of feet of empty air he’d be falling through if he slipped any further. Far, far below, he saw the root he’d been hanging from a moment earlier still plunging toward the rocks.

“Goddamn it,” came the Greek’s voice from overhead—and Gabriel knew his move to the new root had not gone unnoticed. “You’re a stubborn bastard, aren’t you?” And the man began sawing at this final root, the thickest of the three.

Gabriel looked to the side, where Christos and Tigranes had gone, and used his feet to pull himself over toward the spot. There was a prominent outcropping of rock there, blocking his view. Concealed behind it, what would he find? A space large enough for two, apparently; hopefully enough for three. A crevice or fissure in the cliff wall, perhaps, maybe even a small cave—trust an old mountain rat like Tigranes to know the location of every cranny and tunnel in the place. Of course how they’d get down from there was one hell of a question, but right now that was far from Gabriel’s biggest worry.

He could feel the root beginning to come apart. It slipped an inch, two inches—it had to be hanging by its last tough fibers now, and Gabriel knew his weight would swiftly part those even if the knife blade didn’t.

Next to him, he saw a hand appear from around the rock—a young man’s hand. He let go of the root with one of his own and swung his arm over, grabbing hold of Christos’ hand, palm to palm.