Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

Then the root snapped.

He fell with a sharp jerk but held onto Christos’ hand, squeezing tight, clawing with his other hand against the rock and trying to get purchase on the surface with the soles of his boots. He caught hold of the outcropping itself and, using it for leverage, heaved himself around it.

On the other side, there was a ledge. Christos was kneeling on it, one arm braced against the outcropping, the other extended out into space. This was the one Gabriel was holding onto with a bone-crushing grip. Tigranes stood behind Christos, his wiry arms encircling the younger man’s chest, leaning back with all his might. Behind him, a dark, crooked opening led into the mountain itself.

Gabriel found the ledge with one foot, then the other, and Christos helped him up onto it, dragging him the last few inches. Then all three of them fell back into the cool darkness, the blessed solidity of stone beneath their bodies.

From up above, sounding far away, they heard the voice of the man with the knife: “Can you see them? Can you see where they fell?”

“No,” came another voice.

“Then,” said the man with the knife, “where in the holy hell are they?”

Chapter 16

In the light spilling in from the opening, Tigranes held up the broken frame of his phorminx. Its strings hung loose, the wood around them splintered.

He laid it down on the ground sadly, folding the strap over it like the corner of a shroud.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel whispered and Tigranes nodded. None of them wanted to speak too loudly or too much, not while the men above were still hunting for them.

Tigranes gestured for them to follow and, with one hand on the wall to steady himself, led them deeper into the cave. It went on for quite a while, enough so that the light from outside dwindled to a white patch in the darkness—but there was a flickering orange light growing larger from the other direction.

They reached the end of the narrow cleft and made a ninety-degree turn. The sight that greeted them stopped Gabriel and Christos in their tracks.

It was more cavern than cave, a chamber at least fifty feet around and thirty high, seemingly naturally formed, with a pool of water at the center of it; and rising from this pool was a short pedestal of stone carved into the broad, ridged shape of an Ionic column. The capitals of this abbreviated column curled to either side like the horns of a ram. There was a marble seat on top of the capital, a squarish throne, and a larger-than-life-size statue of a muscular man reposed upon it, bare-chested, a stone lyre gripped in one arm. His face was long, his nose and brows prominent. Carved locks of hair tumbled about his ears and down his neck, while a chiseled beard roiled beneath his jaw.

Flame spouted from a pair of shallow stone bowls carved into the wall beside the room’s entrance—natural gas, Gabriel judged from the smell, an eternal flame ignited untold lifetimes ago that had cast its flickering light on this hidden temple ever since.

“What is this place?” Gabriel said.

“It is our Homereion,” Tigranes answered, stepping into the pool, which was only ankle-deep. He walked to the base of the statue, touched his fingers to his lips and pressed them to the carved throne. “A tribute to Chios’ glorious son. There was one like it at Alexandria, greater even than this, built by Ptolemy—the fourth Ptolemy. There was one in Smyrna, one in Ephesus…but this was the very first, built just fifty years after the master’s death. My father brought me here when I was a child of three or four. He carried me in his arms and laid me down right here.” He reached up to pat the statue’s lap, where the stone folds of a toga cast undulant shadows across the figure’s carved knees.

“Why didn’t the residents of Anavatos come down here?” Gabriel said. “In 1822, when the Turks came—rather than leaping to their deaths?”

“Some did—a few,” Tigranes said. “Those who knew of its existence. We kept it secret. Only the Homeridae were permitted to know. The children of Homer.”

“Allowing hundreds of people to die, just to keep a secret—”

“I may be old,” Tigranes said, walking back out of the pool, “but I am not quite that old. Please don’t blame me for something that happened a century before I was born.”

Gabriel nodded. “Of course,” he said.

“Anyway, what do you think would have happened if its existence had been widely known? The Turks would have found out, just as they found out about Anavatos in the first place—by bribing some foolish woman who gave the secret away in return for a few drachmae. They would have come here and slaughtered everyone, and destroyed the Homereion, too. This way at least the handful of people who did know about it were able to survive. And the Homereion as well.”

He found his way to a dry spot at the margin of the room, sat down, and took off his sandals, wiped them on the hem of his chiton. Christos sat beside him. Gabriel remained standing.

“The men who were chasing us,” he said, “the ones working for Andras and DeGroet—they’re going to come back. They may not have the equipment they’d need here—ropes, rappelling gear—but they can get it at Avgonyma, and then they’ll be back. We might have a couple of hours, but not more.”

“Why would they come back?” Christos said. “Why not leave us in peace?”

“You know the answer to that,” Gabriel said. “Because DeGroet will punish them brutally if they let us escape, and pay handsomely if they deliver us to him.” And, Gabriel thought, just imagine what he’d pay to see this place.

“Is there any way out of here,” Gabriel asked, “any back entrance, any way out other than the way we came in?”

Tigranes shook his head. “There is only one other chamber—and the only way in or out is through here.”

It was as bad as he’d feared. Still—

“Might as well see it,” Gabriel said, offering Tigranes a hand to help him to his feet. Tigranes pointedly ignored it and got up on his own. Gabriel found himself hoping he’d be in the shape this old fellow was in when he turned eighty. Then he chastised himself for foolish optimism. What made him think he’d live to forty, never mind eighty?

Tigranes led them around the edge of the room till they were behind the statue. He stopped when he came to an opening in the wall, a low archway he had to duck to pass through. Gabriel bent and followed close behind.

The room beyond the archway was small and dark, lit only by reflected light from outside.

There was no pool in this room, no column, no oblate bowls with dancing flames.

But there was a stone figure.

And behind it, painted on the wall, there was a map.

Gabriel approached the statue slowly, walking in a careful circle around it, looking at it closely from all angles, or as closely as the limited light would permit. The carving, the artistry—it was the same, unmistakably so. And while the Greeks of Homer’s day had surely been more sophisticated sculptors than the Egyptians of Khafre’s, the style here was still incongruous. This was more the vital realism of a Michelangelo, a Bernini. And the figure—

It was the figure of a lioness, lying prone upon the ground, her paws outstretched; except that two-thirds of the way up, her torso became that of a woman, sleek fur replaced by hairless skin, small high breasts bare; and from her human shoulders sprouted a pair of stone wings, which lay neatly folded along her spine. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, as though she were calling out for someone. On her brow the sculptor had given her a diadem, a band to hold back her intricately carved ridges of hair. The statue of Homer outside had been idealized—he looked practically like a god, like Poseidon on his throne looking down upon the waters at his feet. This figure, this sphinx, was more modest—smaller, for one thing, and somehow, though it seemed perverse to think in these terms, less fantastical. Her eyelids, Gabriel noted, had wrinkles at their edges—he ran a finger over them and felt the tiny grooves in the stone. Her breasts—the nipples drooped slightly, as with age. The row upon row of feathers on each wing—each had been carved with meticulous care and craftsmanship.

On her flank, an inscription had been chiseled in angular Greek letters:Accursed daughter of Echidna, rest eternal be yoursYour people shall forget you not, though generations passYour precious one shall hold your image close where you hold hisAnd your holy treasure speeds on Hermes’ wings to Taprobane,Returning to the Cradle of Fear

Gabriel reached into the statue’s open mouth.

“What are you doing?” Tigranes said. And Christos said, “You shouldn’t—”

Gabriel pulled his hand away and came toward them. He held between his fingers a silver coin. On one side was an image of an eagle; on the other, a male face, in profile. He extended it toward Tigranes, who shook his head, and then to Christos, who peered closely at its surface. “The writing on it…is this coin Greek?”

“Egyptian,” Gabriel said.

He turned his attention to the wall. It had been painted with a single enormous teardrop shape; above this, in the uppermost corner of the wall, was the hint of a coastline to the north. It was the reverse of the map he’d found in Egypt: this one showed the island in full and the landmass of India only in part. It also had details painted in—not many, but enough to indicate a path from a spot on the coast to a location inland, very near the center of the island. If this was supposed to be Sri Lanka—Taprobane, as it was known in the days of Alexander—the destination marked would be just northeast of Dambulla. He’d been there once, in pursuit of a priceless wooden Bodhisattva figure stolen from the famous Golden Temple. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything else while he was there—but he had seen the occasional sphinx mixed in among the other figures on wall murals and carvings.

As he recalled, the legends of Sri Lanka spoke of it as a “man-lion”—narasimha—and it played the role of guardian, much as it had here in Greece. Across the sea in southern India, they gave it a Sanskrit name, purush-amriga—the human-beast. Under one name or another sphinxes popped up throughout the lands of Asia. But just what the connections were between the island of Sri Lanka, the Egyptian sphinx, and the sphinx depicted here—presumably the one from the Oedipodea—was a mystery to Gabriel. And if there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was a mystery. Especially one people were willing to kill each other over.

“I think the time has come for us to find out a bit more about this sphinx,” he said to Tigranes. “If you know anything—”

“I do,” Tigranes said, nodding slowly. “The tale of Oedipus is but half the matter of the Oedipodea. The poet also told the story of the sphinx: her birth, her fierce defense of Thebes, her departure thence for Chios’ shores—”

“We don’t have four nights, I’m afraid,” Gabriel said.

“That’s quite all right,” Tigranes said. “I’ll begin where you wish.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t do that,” Gabriel said, “that you could only recite the entire poem from the start.”

“Do you believe everything someone tells you?” Tigranes said with a sly hint of a smile. “Here, let us go out into the main chamber again. I will feel my instrument’s absence less in the shadow of my master.”

They returned to the room with the statue of Homer in it, sat down at the edge of the pool. Tigranes began to speak, to sing, his voice echoing gently from wall to wall. Gabriel looked up at the statue. With the firelight playing over its carved features, you could almost imagine that it, and not Tigranes, was reciting the ancient words.

And the story of the sphinx unfolded. Gabriel didn’t interrupt, just listened, and as he did, pieces of the puzzle finally began to fall into place.

Chapter 17

“Are you saying she really existed, all those centuries ago?” Christos said when Tigranes fell silent. He’d been listening even more intently than Gabriel, if that was possible. “She really lived?”

“What, the sphinx? She was as real,” Tigranes said, “as Oedipus—as real as the Minotaur and the Lernean Hydra—as real as Zeus and Apollo and all the rest of them. How real that is, each man must decide for himself. I, for one, am prepared to believe she was as real as you or I. This world has many strange things in it, and one must never fall into the trap of saying, ‘I have never seen it, so it follows that no man has; and as no man has ever seen it, thus it cannot be.’”

This was a lesson Gabriel had learned many times himself over the years, when his voyages to some of the world’s more obscure corners had brought him face to face with things other people might say were impossible. Why, earlier this very year he’d fought side by side in the Guatemalan jungle with a man no less than 150 years old, kept youthful by the waters of, well, if it wasn’t literally the Fountain of Youth it might as well have been. Cierra Alamanzar had been with him; they had both witnessed it. But could they tell anyone what they’d seen without being called liars or worse? They could not. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Still, a sphinx—an actual, living beast, half lion and half human? If ever something deserved to be called impossible…

“So you’re saying,” Christos began again, “that—”

“I am saying nothing,” Tigranes corrected him. “It is Homer who said it. I merely recount what he reported.”

“And he reported,” Gabriel said, “that the island of Taprobane, source of cinnamon and spice, of coconuts and tea, also bred sphinxes for export to Egypt and Greece?”

“Not just sphinxes,” Tigranes said. “All manner of monstrous crossbreed. The men of Taprobane were the greatest breeders of the ancient world. You could not get a sphinx anywhere else—not for all the gold and rubies in the richest treasury on earth. So great men came to Taprobane in secret, and not only the rulers of Egypt and Greece, either—every kingdom from the Indies to Ultima Thule came.”

“To the cradle of fear,” Gabriel said.

“Yes. The cradle of fear. The place every king and sultan and emperor the world over sent to for his guardian beasts, his fearsome defenders of temples and labyrinths, of secrets great or small.”

“And how did this island come to develop this…specialty?” Gabriel said.

“How did the men of Arabia come to tame stallions? Who knows? Homer does not say. He merely tells us that they played this role for longer than man’s memory can tell.”

Gabriel pondered the story. No doubt it had its roots in some germ of truth, but how much or how little those roots resembled the distant branches that had flowered elaborately in the millennia since, there was no way to know. No doubt the early Sri Lankans had bred something, perhaps a variety of fearsome beasts, perhaps ones their visitors from far-flung lands found strange and unfamiliar, and that fact had blossomed in the telling into a reputation for breeding monsters. Or maybe, who knows, the men of Sri Lanka might have been extraordinary sculptors, ones who traveled the world overseeing the creation of monumental statues like that of the Great Sphinx at Giza, and over time their reputation for fashioning beasts of stone and clay got transmuted into a reputation for breeding their living, breathing counterparts. It was easy to imagine how that might happen.

Still…the story, true or false, unquestionably had the power to compel the imagination, to enthrall—and perhaps not just credulous youths such as Steve McQueen here. Even a worldly sort like Lajos DeGroet might find his attention seized by all this talk of holy treasure.

“Do you have any idea what the treasure is that the inscription speaks of? And who it was that was supposed to return it to Taprobane?”

“The story goes,” Tigranes said, “that the men from Taprobane made the long voyage here themselves to collect it, and left behind them the map and the inscription you see as a reminder that they’d been. Directions, if you will, that they might be found again should the need for their services once more arise. But as for what the treasure was, no one knows. Some have speculated that it was wealth that our sphinx had received in tribute, some that it might have been a religious artifact created in her honor. Some…”

“Yes?”

“Some think it refers to some part of the sphinx herself, collected at the time of her death—her heart, perhaps, or her eyes. They were thought to be the seat of her power, you see.”

“Power? What power?”

“All sphinxes were said to have the power to destroy their enemies with a glance,” Tigranes said. “By rendering them physically paralyzed with fear.”

Gabriel thought of the Great Sphinx of Egypt, called Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear. And his Greek counterpart, called “Strangler” after her method of putting victims to death—perhaps the ancient Greeks had meant not literal, physical strangulation but the inducement of a terror so extreme its victim couldn’t breathe?

The children of the cradle of fear, bringing fear to the four corners of the world.

Gabriel felt a chill go down his spine. Was Lajos DeGroet simply after new trophies for his collection or was he searching for something considerably more sinister—more dangerous? Certainly the amount of firepower he’d flown over to Egypt had suggested something deadlier than your average relic-hunting expedition. But what could this man possibly have hoped to find in the belly of the Sphinx? Some artifact that might give him this legendary power of the sphinx, the power to terrify with a glance? And if so…to what end? To what use would a man in possession of ungodly wealth, a private army, a staggering ego and unmatched ambition put such a power? Gabriel didn’t know the answer—he just knew he was glad DeGroet hadn’t yet found what he was looking for.

But of course now—

Damn it, now he would find it. The one advantage Gabriel had had was that back in Egypt DeGroet hadn’t found the coin in the statue’s mouth. He’d only found the partial map the chamber had contained, and no clue as to where the remainder might be located. But now he knew that Gabriel was on Chios…and soon his men, in searching for the three of them, would stumble upon this temple. And then the rest of the map would be his.

They heard a sound then.

It came from outside, where the tunnel began. It was the sound of a heavy rope uncoiling and slapping against the stone wall. And then a second one.

They all looked at each other.

“Come on,” Gabriel said.

“What are you going to do?” Christos whispered.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I’ll think of something.”

They retraced their steps through the tunnel, watching the white patch in the distance grow larger as they neared it. They could see the two ropes, hanging in front of the opening, and as they watched, a figure carefully let itself down on one of them in a mountaineering harness. The figure was brightly backlit, so Gabriel couldn’t make out the person’s features; he only hoped this meant he had the benefit on his side of being hidden in relative darkness. He flattened himself against the tunnel wall and drew his Colt, empty though it was. Sometimes you played a weak hand just because all your chips were in the pot and it was the hand you had.

He cocked the pistol loudly. “Set one foot in here and you’re a dead man,” Gabriel said, his voice bristling with as much self-confidence as he could project.

“That’s a hell of a way to greet an old friend,” a familiar voice replied, somewhat unsteadily.

And then Sheba unlatched herself from the rope and stepped into the tunnel.

Gabriel rushed forward. He swept her up in his arms and lifted her off her feet, buried his face in her hair. He could feel that she was trembling. “How…how did you get here?”

“A girl could grow old waiting for you to bring her a pair of shoes.”

He unzipped the pocket of his jacket, found the pair of loafers crumpled beside Andras’ broken cell phone. He took them out. “I got you these.”

“That’s all right,” Sheba said. She took a deep breath, let it out. Her voice steadied. “I took care of myself.”

She had. She was wearing khaki pants and a ribbed white tank top under a lightweight jacket, and on her feet she had what looked like steel-toed climbing boots. Gabriel tossed the loafers aside.

“Sheba,” Gabriel said, switching back to Greek for the purpose of making introductions, “this is Christos.” The young man extended a hand, and she shook it. He seemed to be having some difficulty raising his eyes higher than the snug fabric of her tank top. “And this is Tigranes.”

“Tigranes?” she said. “That’s an interesting name. You know they say that was Homer’s name, originally, before—”

“Before his captivity, yes. I know.” Tigranes smiled. “I am surprised, however, that a young woman such as yourself, a foreigner, would know this.”

“Sheba’s a surprising young woman indeed,” Gabriel said, “and she knows practically everything.” He pulled her to one side. “I think,” he whispered in English, “you just made a friend for life.”

“Who are they?” she whispered back.

“They’re on our side. That’s all that matters.” Gabriel walked closer to the ledge, inspected the ropes. Reaching out, he tugged on each in turn. They were both solidly anchored. But thinking back to Sheba’s terror on the battlements in Hungary, he knew that climbing down the face of a cliff—even a short distance, even on a well-anchored rope—couldn’t have been easy for her.

“Where did you get the equipment?” he asked.

“Same place I picked up your trail. You’d said you were going to Avgonyma, so I followed you there—”

“Barefoot?”

“I found a pair of sandals in the house,” Sheba said. “Pretty flimsy, but good enough to get me to Avgonyma.”

“Where you found…?”

“Everything you see. The boots were the hardest to come by, but I found a merchant who had hiking and climbing gear. The most interesting thing happened while I was there haggling with him, though—these two trucks drove up and a dozen men poured out with a story of having been through a gun battle and trapped ‘the American’ on the side of the mountain.”

“The American,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t think it might be some other American?”

“Trapped on the side of a mountain after a gun battle? Not for a moment.”

“And all this equipment—how did you get your hands on it? I would have expected the Greeks to grab whatever the guy had.”

“Oh, they did,” Sheba said. “They grabbed it and loaded it into one of the trucks.”

“And?”

“And I stole the truck,” Sheba said.

“You stole the truck,” Gabriel said.

“That’s right.”

“But didn’t you say they had another truck?” Gabriel said.

“They did,” Sheba said. “What they have now is a gas tank full of sand.”

Gabriel kissed her, hard, on the lips. “You’re something else,” he said when they finally came up for air. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me two,” Sheba whispered. “But who’s counting?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go up first? Christos and I can follow and then we can pull Tigranes up—”

“You don’t need to pull Tigranes anywhere,” Tigranes said. “I can climb a rope, young man.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go first, then.”

Tigranes clamped his weathered palms around the rope and was up it in a flash. Christos followed, more slowly, and then it was time for Sheba to go. She took care reattaching her safety harness.

“I appreciate what it meant for you to come here,” Gabriel told her, steadying the rope so she could climb on. “I know you’re no fan of heights.”

“Heights are okay,” Sheba said, her voice trembling again. “It’s just falling I can’t stand.” And she began the short climb, pulling herself up hand over hand.

Gabriel took one more look around, at the broken phorminx lying on the ground and the dark tunnel beyond. A more ruthless sort, he thought, might try to arrange some sort of rockfall, some way of closing up the opening forever so DeGroet’s men couldn’t find it. But DeGroet had been right, back in Giza. Even if there had been a way, he couldn’t bring himself to do it—not if it meant destroying something this precious and irreplaceable.

There’d be another way to stop DeGroet. There always was another way.

He grabbed hold of the rope with his hands and feet and climbed it to the top.

Chapter 18

The truck only had a quarter of a tank of gas and lousy brakes, but Gabriel figured the former would be enough to get them to the docks at Chios Town if the latter didn’t cause them to drive off the side of the mountain first.

Sheba was sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the two lengths of rope coiled in her lap. Tigranes and Christos were in the back of the truck, enjoying a bumpy ride. Gabriel kept the gas as close to the floor as he could while still making all the hairpin turns and switchbacks necessary to get to the bottom of the mountain. There was no telling how long they had before DeGroet’s men regrouped, found another truck and more supplies, and headed back up this narrow road. He really didn’t want to meet them head on.

As he drove, Gabriel filled Sheba in on what she’d missed. Her eyebrows rose quizzically when he came to the part about the living sphinxes.

“Really,” she said. “He told you there was a real sphinx.”

“Two of them. A boy sphinx in Egypt and a girl sphinx in Greece.”

“And they met.”

“Well, when Oedipus chased her out of Thebes, she had to go somewhere, didn’t she?” Gabriel slowed to take a particularly nasty turn, then sped up in the straightaway that followed.

“I thought the story was that she threw herself to her death off the side of a cliff after he answered her riddle,” Sheba said.

“She threw herself, but not to her death. Wings, remember?”

“Ah. Of course.”

“After a stop in Chios for, oh, a hundred years or so, she headed over to Egypt where she met her counterpart in Giza.”

“A hundred years? Just how long are these sphinxes supposed to live?”

“Oh, a few thousand years, give or take,” Gabriel said.

“According to the old man in the back of our truck,” Sheba said.

“According to Homer,” Gabriel said. He was silent for a moment. “If you ask the old man in the back of our truck.”

“All right, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I buy it. The lady sphinx spends a hundred years in Chios, then heads over to Giza, where the old Father of Fear wines and dines her, shows off the nifty statue of him they’ve got over there, and then what?”

“Back to Chios. She stays there for the rest of her life, from about 900 BC till about 250 or so, inspiring art and architecture and lending her face to the city’s coins. And somewhere in there she meets a young local boy and tells him her story…and he eventually tells it to the rest of the world when he grows up to become Homer.”

“I see,” Sheba said.

“Well, that makes one of us,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know what’s crazier, the idea of a three-thousand-year-old monster telling her story to a young Homer or the idea of a seventy-year-old monster chasing around after her lost treasure today.”

“Well, crazy or not, we know at least the second part’s true,” Sheba said.

“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “And if we knew it was just some archaeological treasure he was after, maybe we could let him have it. But it’s not. Or maybe it’s not—nobody knows. But we can’t take the chance.”

“Of what, exactly?” Sheba said. “Letting DeGroet get his hands on something that would give him the power to terrify with a glance? It’s not like the man isn’t plenty scary as it is.”

“It’s not a question of being scary,” Gabriel said. “If you believe Tigranes, it’s the power literally to paralyze with fear. And not just one person—a hundred people, a thousand at once, however many the sphinx looked upon. And with modern technology at DeGroet’s disposal, the ability to broadcast to millions…”

Sheba laughed, then stopped when she noticed Gabriel wasn’t laughing along. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I grant you, it could all be nonsense—DeGroet could be chasing after a myth. But if it’s not and he’s not…we can’t let him find what he’s after.”

“And how are we supposed to stop him?”

“By finding it ourselves first,” Gabriel said. “And while we’re at it, by finding him.”

“Oh, yeah? Did that map on the wall show you where he is?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “But I’ve got something that will.”

He reached into his pocket and held up Andras’ cell phone.

The sun was hanging low behind the mountains when they pulled up to the ferry landing. The ferry was there, bobbing in the water and bumping against the row of old Goodyears lashed to the pilings as a cushion. Across the way, through the late afternoon haze, the coast of Turkey loomed. He could see the battlements of Çeşme Castle faintly in the distance.

“Book passage for four,” Gabriel said, passing Sheba a handful of money, all he had left except for a single hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

“They’re coming with us?”

“We can’t leave them here. We’ll find a safe place for them on the other side.”

“And where are you going?”

“To find a telephone,” Gabriel said, and he headed off toward a low bunker with cement walls that looked as though it served some official function. It was a law the world over: officials had telephones.

He had to ask several people dressed in crisp uniforms before being directed to a payphone hanging from a wall. Stickers on its side advertised taxi services and island tours. Gabriel dialed the operator and asked to place a collect call to New York.

The phone rang four times before Michael answered it. “Hello?”

“Will you accept a collect call,” the operator asked in heavily accented English, “from a Mr. Gabriel—”

“Yes, yes, absolutely, operator—put him through. Gabriel? Gabriel? Are you there? Are you okay?”

“Calm down, Michael. I’m fine.”

“Is Sheba…?”

“She’s fine, too. We’re both a little banged up—”

“I knew it,” Michael said miserably.

“—but nothing that won’t heal. Now, listen, Michael, I need something from you.”

“Anything.”

“I need the name of someone in this area who could hack into a busted cell phone and tell me what the last number it got called by was—and then trace that number.”

“Where are you?”

“Chios. But in a few minutes I’m going to be headed to Turkey.”

“Çeşme?”

“That’s right,” Gabriel said. He heard Michael typing on a computer keyboard.

“Mm,” Michael muttered to himself. “No, he’s…no…”

Gabriel turned to look out the window. Dusk was descending suddenly, as it always did in this part of the world; one minute it was still light out, the next you’d be looking at a starry sky.

“Do you think you could make it up to Istanbul?” Michael asked suddenly.

“If we had to,” Gabriel said. “Why? Who’s in Istanbul?”

“There’s someone the Foundation has used before—he goes by the name ‘Cipher,’ moves around a lot, but last we heard he was in Istanbul. Never met the man myself, just e-mail back and forth, but he really knows his stuff. Computers, phones—what you’re talking about would be right up his alley.”

“How’d you find him?”

“He came to us,” Michael said. “Couple of years back, offered to help with a project we were working on at the time. Don’t know how he found out about it…but then he wouldn’t be very good at what he does if he hadn’t been able to, right?”

“I suppose,” Gabriel said, not much liking the sound of it. He preferred dealing with people who went by their names, not clever handles like “Cipher.” For that matter, he preferred dealing with almost anything to dealing with computers and cell phones. But sometimes you had to. “Can you send him a message, let him know I’m on my way?”

“Already done,” Michael said. “How can I contact you to let you know what he—” Michael stopped in midsentence. “Well, well, will you look at that.”

“What?”

“I just got a message back from him,” Michael said. “Literally, right now. From Cipher.”

“Well, that should make you feel important,” Gabriel said.

“You, too—listen to this: ‘The famous Gabriel Hunt, coming here? How could I say no?’ That’s what he wrote. ‘Tell him to meet me at the Basilica Cistern at midnight.’ The famous Gabriel Hunt. How do you like that?”

“Not much,” Gabriel said.

“Can you make it there by midnight?”

Gabriel looked at his watch. “Only if I hang up now,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there. And Michael—”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” He hung up.

He returned to the pier, threaded his way through a small crowd to where the ferry was tied up. Tigranes and Christos were already on board. Sheba was waiting at the foot of the ramp, two tickets in her hand. Her face lit up when she saw Gabriel coming toward her—but then her expression changed to one of alarm.

Gabriel looked back over his shoulder. Coming up the long road to the docks was a jeep and at its wheel was a man he recognized even at this distance—it was the knife artist from Anavatos, the one who’d thrown him off the cliff.

“Come on,” he said, “get on board.” He hustled Sheba up the ramp and, reaching over to the bitt the ferry’s hawser was coiled around, he yanked the great rope free.

“We are not ready to depart yet!” a crewman said, rushing up.

“Hundred dollars says you are,” Gabriel said and handed over his last bill. He patted the man on the shoulder. “Go.”

The man scurried up front and a moment later the engine sputtered to life.

By the time the jeep squealed to a stop by the dock, the ferry was twenty yards out to sea and plowing toward Turkey. He saw the driver leap out of the truck and run up to the water’s edge. He tore the cap he was wearing from his head and dashed it to the wooden planks at his feet. “We will find you!” he shouted at the departing ship. “Wherever you run, we will find you!”

“Or vice versa,” Gabriel whispered.

Chapter 19

The Basilica Cistern had stood in more or less its present form, Gabriel knew, since the sixth century, when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great had had it constructed. It was hard to imagine that it had once served a municipal function, supplying water to the Topkapi Palace. A grand underground space filled with ranks of colossal columns, hundreds of them, each thirty feet high, stretched as far as the eye could see beneath an arched and vaulted ceiling. The Turks called it Yerebatan Sarayi, the sunken palace. Each column was lit from below with flame red lights, giving the space an ominous appearance. You expected a man in a cape and domino mask to step into view at any moment from behind one of the columns, carrying a wax-sealed missive—or a dagger to slip between your ribs. Which no doubt was why this man Cipher had chosen it for their meeting. His name itself suggested his taste for the dramatic.

In one corner of the space, a quartet was playing for an appreciative audience of tourists seated in metal folding chairs, the sounds of lute and zither, flute and fiddle filling the air with mournful Ottoman melodies. Gabriel steered clear of the area. Cipher wouldn’t be caught out in the open like that, he felt sure; men who spent their lives behind the screens of laptop computers infiltrating global telecommunications networks generally didn’t congregate with tour groups at midnight concerts.

Although you never knew. Gabriel didn’t generally congregate with tour groups himself, yet he’d spent most of the past five hours on a bus with a church group out of West Virginia who’d taken a day trip to Çeş;me to see the castle and the museum and the seaside and now had the long trip back to Istanbul to look at each other’s digital photographs and share loud anecdotes about the marvels they had seen. Sheba had been the one to spot the coach parked outside the castle, its side painted with the VARAN TURIZM logo, its door open, the driver standing outside having a smoke. She’d also been the one to talk him into letting the four of them occupy the uncomfortable pair of benches in the rear by the lavatory in return for what little cash they had left and an extorted kiss on the cheek. Christos and Tigranes had piled on board gratefully and slept through most of the ride, the younger man leaning up against the window and snoring softly, the older sitting stock-still and silent in his seat.

“Your father?” one of the women from West Virginia had asked, and Gabriel had said, “My rabbi,” and she’d left him alone after that.

It was just as well that they’d made the trip, Gabriel thought as he circled around the interior of the cistern, pausing to look at every man who was there by himself and giving each a chance to look at him. In order to get a flight out to Sri Lanka they’d have had to make their way to one of the larger cities eventually, either to Istanbul or Ankara, and the drive would have been just as arduous either way. Still, around the end of the third hour, when the hymns had started, he had found himself wishing that they’d turned up some other form of transportation.

As he completed one full circuit of the space, he spotted a man standing between the two Medusa-head pillars in the rear corner, his face lit by the glow from a palmtop computer, his stylus clicking away across its illuminated surface. Gabriel walked over, stood beside him, waited for him to look up. He wore thick glasses and had his hair cut short, with a cowlick standing up in back. The stubble dotting his lantern jaw said he hadn’t shaved in a day or two. Finally he put the stylus away and thumbed off the light. “Do I…know you?” he said.

“Cipher?”

He looked blank. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, this will be perfect, darling,” a woman’s voice interrupted. Turning, they both saw a petite brunette approaching. She was carrying a camera in one hand and had a notebook and pen in the other. “I can have them hide in here from the guards when they’re being chased—” Then she noticed Gabriel. “Hello,” she said. And to the man: “Want to introduce me?”

“I’d love to,” the man said, “but we hadn’t quite gotten to the point of introducing ourselves.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, “I thought you were someone else—”

“I’m Naomi,” the woman said, extending a hand. “We’re here doing research. I write historical fantasy novels and my husband here writes adventure stories.” Gabriel took her hand, shook it briefly, released it. “And you’re…?”

“Gabriel,” he said reluctantly.

“I knew it,” the man said. “I do know you. Gabriel Hunt, right? Darling, you remember, that book with the Phoenician temple art. You wrote that, right?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“But I recognize you, from the photo on the back.”

“I just wrote the introduction,” Gabriel said. “The publisher slapped my picture on it. Now, I’m sorry but I really have to go—”

“So soon?” came another voice, and a second woman walked out from behind the nearer of the columns with the fearsome head of Medusa carved at the base. She was slender—no, more than that, she was skinny, almost gaunt; even in the red-tinged light Gabriel could see that her skin was pale, her cheeks hollow. She wore her dark hair chopped in a spiky pixie cut with ragged bangs and had a row of four or five silver rings in each earlobe. A tattoo of a serpent with a flicking tongue trailed down her throat, its tail disappearing beneath her chin. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, both of which looked battered enough that they probably wouldn’t survive another laundering, which made it just as well that they didn’t seem likely to get one any time soon. Her heavy boots added at least three inches to her height, but even so she only came to Gabriel’s chin. Over one shoulder was slung the strap of a bulging canvas satchel whose contents looked like they might weigh almost as much as she did.

But none of these things about her were what made Gabriel take a step back in disbelief.

He did that because he recognized her.

“The famous Gabriel Hunt,” she said. “Stay a while, why don’t you? Greet your fans.”

“Lucy?” Gabriel said, and a wicked smile crossed her face.

“Cifer,” she said.

“Excuse us, please,” Gabriel said and pulled his sister by the arm toward an empty section of the cistern.

“That wasn’t very polite,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” she said. “For now. You’re the one who’s dropping in out of nowhere and heading right back out an hour later.”

“Does Michael know…?”

“What, that the mysterious guy who’s been helping him out with one thing or another for the past two years is his kid sister? Not a chance. And you’re not going to tell him, either. Not if you ever want to get your e-mail delivered again.”

“I don’t have e-mail.”

She rolled her eyes. “Figures. Fine. If you don’t want a tax audit each year for the next decade. Computers are powerful things, Gabriel.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Well, don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of telling Michael. It would break his heart.”

She looked off to one side. “He wouldn’t care.”

“Are you kidding? He hasn’t seen his sister in nine years, hasn’t heard from her, not a letter, not a call—as far as he knows. If he found out you’ve been playing him for a fool—”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “I’ve been helping him.”

“You’ve been lying to him.”

“Helpfully,” Lucy said.

Gabriel shook his head. He gave her a long look, taking her in from head to toe. “What’s happened to you? You haven’t been eating well.”

“I eat fine,” she said. “Just, you know, vegan. It’s a bitch getting your protein. But on the other hand the food’s cheap.”

“Cheap?” Gabriel said. He lowered his voice. “My god, Lucy, you shouldn’t be worried about money. You could have all the money you want—more than you could want—”

“Not that money. I don’t want it. It’s theirs, not ours.”

Gabriel put a hand on her shoulder but she shook it off. “They’re dead,” he said gently.

“They’re missing,” she said.

“It’s been nine years,” Gabriel said.

“It’s been nine years since you saw me, too. Am I dead?”

“Pretty close,” Gabriel said. “Look at you.” He pulled her heavy bag off her shoulder, slung it over his. She let him. “Come on. I’m buying you a proper meal.” Then he remembered he had no cash left. He went through a mental list of places he knew in the area that would be open at midnight and where the proprietor might throw the bill away. “Devrim. He’ll feed you.”

She followed him up the stairs to street level. “No meat,” she warned. He didn’t say anything. “Did you hear me? I’m serious. Not on my plate, not on yours, or I’m walking.”

“All right, princess,” Gabriel said.

“Call me that again and—”

“I know,” Gabriel said, “you’re walking.”

“No,” Lucy said. “Call me that again and you’re not walking, because I’ll break both your legs.”

They stared each other down. Then a crooked grin crept onto Gabriel’s face and, reaching out, he pulled her into a hug. After a moment, he could feel her thin arms digging hard into his back.

“My god, Lucy, it’s so good to see you again.”

She burrowed her forehead into his chest. When she spoke he could barely make out the words. “Why couldn’t you find them?”

He stroked back her hair. “I tried, Lucy. I tried.”

Devrim’s place was off Tevkifhane Street, up a flight of stairs. You couldn’t see it from outside. You just had to know it was there.

The big man greeted Gabriel warmly, slapping a meaty paw on either side of Gabriel’s hand and shaking vigorously. Then he turned to Lucy. “And who is this creature you bring to me, this starved thing? We fatten her up, no?”

“Gabriel—” she said, but he shushed her. She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped one foot.

“This is my sister,” Gabriel told Devrim.

“Ah. My apologies, miss. Any relative of Gabriel’s…” His voice trailed off. “Sit, I bring wine.”

They took a table in the corner farthest from the door and turned a pair of high-backed wooden chairs to screen them from view. Not that there was anyone else here at the moment, and not that Devrim himself would pry, but—

When Lucy began unpacking the satchel, Gabriel felt a bit like a surgical trainee on his first day in the OR, watching the doctors lay out instruments of which he didn’t even know the names, much less the functions. He sipped from the fat-bellied goblet of wine Devrim had brought and watched Lucy hook cables from this device to that, looked on as a little screen flickered to life and text began racing across it. “Spill that wine on anything you see and you’re a dead man,” Lucy said, her fingers darting nimbly over a keyboard.

“Not a problem,” Gabriel said, and drained the glass.

It was good wine. Devrim always managed to get his hands on the best.

“So Michael says you need a phone number traced,” Lucy said. “You’ve got what, a cell phone that called the number?”

“I’ve got a broken cell phone,” Gabriel said, “that was called by the number.” He took Andras’ phone from his pocket, set it down, and slid it across the scarred wooden surface of the table. Lucy looked at it. The screen had a jagged crack down its center and the phone’s hinged top half hung lopsidedly from the bottom. Lucy pressed the power button a couple of times and nothing happened.

“You don’t make things easy, do you?”

“Rarely,” Gabriel said.

Lucy pried open a panel at the back of the phone, popped out the battery, and dug around inside the body of the phone. She slapped it twice, hard, against the heel of her hand, as though trying to jar something loose, then went digging again.

“Go talk to your friend,” she said, not looking at him as she poked at the phone’s innards. “I’m going to be a while.”

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Take your time.”

He found Devrim at the top of the stairs, smoking a long, thin, brown cigarette, the heavy smell of Turkish tobacco hanging in the corridor.

“Your sister, huh?” Devrim said. Gabriel nodded. “Looks nothing like you.”

“She takes after our mother,” he said.

“And you look like your father?”

“I look like the milkman,” Gabriel said, and Devrim gave him a confused look. Then he laughed, a single loud bark. “The milkman! Hah! You are a devil, Gabriel.”

Gabriel rotated his shoulder and flexed his arm, which was getting stiff where the blade had gone in. His palms were still raw from hanging onto the roots in Anavatos and his cheek ached every time he opened his mouth. “I must be,” he muttered. “I feel like hell.”

“Hey,” Lucy’s voice floated in from the other room, “I’ve got it. Wanna see?”

Gabriel levered himself to his feet again and returned to the table. “I thought you said it would take a while.”

“It did,” Lucy said. “Just not a long while. Sit.” He sat, stared at the screen she was pointing to proudly. It showed a Mercator map of the world with two blinking white symbols, one an X, the other an O. The X was sitting, pulsing, on the northern coastline of Turkey. The O was just off the eastern coast of Chios—and moving, slowly, one tick at a time, toward the X.

“That’s us?” Gabriel asked, pointing at the X.

“Right,” Lucy said. “And that’s the person you’re looking for. Though it looks more like he’s looking for you.” They both watched as the O came another tiny notch closer to the X.

Chapter 20

DeGroet was coming.

It was hardly a surprise—he needed to get to Sri Lanka as well, and Istanbul was the nearest major international hub. But Gabriel couldn’t help the feeling that there was more to it, that DeGroet had been briefed by the man they’d left behind on the pier, that he was coming via Turkey in part because he knew this was where they’d fled. Hell, maybe they’d somehow been followed into Turkey by one of DeGroet’s agents or their trail had been picked up once they arrived by someone he already had in place. There could be men closing in as they sat here—on Gabriel and Lucy in Devrim’s, or on Sheba in the hostel where he’d left her to arrange a room for Christos and Tigranes.

“We’ve got to go,” Gabriel said.

“What?” Lucy said. “This instant?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just not safe. Devrim,” he called, “you’ll take care of my sister another night, right?”

“Any night,” Devrim called back. “Every night. Till she weighs as much as my own daughter.”

“Thank you.” Gabriel shot a lingering look at the screen with its handy little map as Lucy began disconnecting her machinery and stuffing it back in her bag. This was exactly the sort of technology he hated—and yet…it wouldn’t hurt to know where DeGroet was at any given time. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could take this with me,” he said, lifting the unit.

“No,” Lucy said and plucked it out of his hands. “The way you carry on? It’d be smashed in five minutes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right. Well—”

“This on the other hand,” Lucy said, holding up a black plastic box the size of a pack of playing cards, “you can bang around till the cows come home and you won’t break it. Doesn’t have the fancy map on it, but what it’s got’s just as good.” She flicked a switch on the bottom of the box and a single row of red digits lit up along one of its shorter sides:

178SW

Then after a second the display changed:

177SW

“Miles?” Gabriel said.

“You prefer kilometers?”

“No,” Gabriel said, “I prefer miles.”

He slipped the box into his pocket beside his Zippo. “How long will the battery—”

“A week. If you keep it on the whole time, maybe a little less.” She finished packing, looked around for anything she’d missed. “You want me to show you how to change it?”

Gabriel shook his head. “This’ll all be over in a lot less than a week. One way or another.”

An anxious look crossed her face. She reached up a hand and stroked the side of his jaw, avoiding the raw slash that was just beginning to heal. “Just how much trouble are you in?”

“Oh, nothing too serious,” Gabriel said, and he worked up a smile he hoped didn’t look too phony. “You know better than to worry about me.”

She nodded, and the trust in her eyes took him back fifteen years, to when he was twenty-three and she was eleven and he’d keep her up past her bedtime with stories about the places he’d been and the dangers he’d faced. But there was a measure of concern in her expression, too. “I know you can take care of yourself. But—”

“But what?”

“I follow what you do, Gabriel. Newspaper articles, the things you publish, people posting online that they saw you one place or another—”

“Computers are powerful things,” Gabriel said.

“Yeah. Well. Any time your name pops up on my screen, there’s part of me that’s excited, but there’s part of me that’s sure each time it’s your obituary I’m going to read.” Her voice fell. “The famous Gabriel Hunt, clawed to death by wild dogs in Zambia. The famous Gabriel Hunt falls from the wing of an airplane. Something.”

“I always wear my seat belt on airplanes,” Gabriel said. “And dogs love me.”

“Well that’s a relief,” she said. “But I’m just talking the law of averages. You can be the best in the world at what you do and there’ll still come a day when you get unlucky.”

“Is that why you agreed to see me when Michael sent his note?” Gabriel said. “After all this time? Because you thought it might be your last chance?”

“Of course not,” she said. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I was just thinking, how many times are you and I going to be in the same place. The way you move around. The way I do.”

Gabriel lifted her chin with his knuckle. “Don’t worry about me, kid,” he said. “I always come out on top.”

“Well, good. You can prove it,” she said, tapping a forefinger against the pocket where the little box lay, “by not getting yourself killed before that battery runs out.”

They separated on Tevkifhane Street. Gabriel watched her back recede as she walked quickly in the direction of the Blue Mosque, that Laurel-and-Hardy contraption of slender minarets and squat domes. It was brightly lit and stood out against the pitch-black of the sky like a picture cut out from a magazine and pasted on a scrapbook page.

When he could no longer see her, Gabriel turned in the other direction and headed toward the hostel where Sheba was waiting. On the way he passed the Four Seasons hotel, located in what had once been a prison building. The man at the front entrance, who looked as though he might have held the same job back in the building’s earlier incarnation, touched two fingers to the brim of his cap and nodded as Gabriel went by.

A moment later, Gabriel heard footsteps behind him. Two men, he thought—possibly three. Trying to keep their steps quiet.

So the nod hadn’t been for him.

He risked a glance back, saw two men directly behind him, maybe ten yards away, and a third across the street. He didn’t recognize the first two—but the third was Mr. Molnar, the round-faced Magyar whose brother had had the bad sense to charge at him in Budapest when his Colt had still had a bullet in it. Their eyes met, and even at this distance Gabriel could see that the intensity of his feelings had not abated.

“Hunt!” he bellowed, followed by another of those curses that seem so ubiquitous in the Hungarian tongue. Then he and the other two started running toward Gabriel, who took off as well, racing toward the nearby intersection with Kutlugün Street. It was a dark street of short, red-roofed buildings, mostly little hotels and cafes, all of them shuttered tight at half past one in the morning. Gabriel kept going, sprinting for the nearest corner. Sheba was on the next street over, Akbiyik Caddesi, the Street of the White Moustache; it was a slightly less reputable avenue, where the hostels were dingier and the proprietors asked fewer questions, like why a young American woman might be renting a room for two Greek men using a third man’s credit card number.

He could hear his pursuers’ shoes pounding against the paving stones close behind him. That they hadn’t pulled pistols and started shooting at him yet Gabriel attributed entirely to the late hour: they wouldn’t want to wake the entire neighborhood with the sound of gunfire. But if they managed to get their hands on him, Gabriel knew, Molnar wouldn’t need bullets to exact revenge for his brother’s death.

Gabriel skidded to a stop beside a shuttered store. There was a narrow alleyway between it and the next building over and he darted into it, leaping up at the far end to catch hold of the curlicue grillwork at the base of a second-story balcony. He pulled himself up, his arms complaining at the strain. From the balcony he was able to climb onto a bit of ornamental stonework that decorated the building’s wall, testing it first with one foot to make sure it was secure. Then from there he grabbed hold of the edge of the roof and hauled himself up.

Down below, he could hear the three men pouring into the alley. The footsteps stopped and the cursing resumed. They wouldn’t be stymied for long: it was a dead end and the only direction Gabriel could have gone was up. But every second counted, and Gabriel used the next few to sprint to the edge of the building and leap across a narrow airshaft onto the neighboring roof.

He landed badly, twisting his ankle.

Damn it—the law of averages hadn’t had to choose this moment to kick in, had it? He hobbled away from the edge of the roof, putting weight on his left foot only gingerly, twinges of pain shooting up his shin each time he did so.

He was close to Sheba’s hostel (the Sultan—but then every other building in this city was called “the Sultan”). On one hand, he didn’t want to bring Molnar and the other two to her doorstep—that could put her and Tigranes and Christos all in danger. On the other hand, they might be in danger already, if DeGroet had sent a separate team after them, and if so they might need him there to help. There was no way to know what the right decision was. Except that standing still wasn’t it. He limped on, telling himself that the pain in his ankle was already lessening a bit, even though it wasn’t.

At the edge of the building he reached a gap too large for him to jump even if his leg had been fine; so, looking around, he yanked open the only door he could see on the roof and clambered down the stairs he found inside. Behind him, as the metal door slowly swung shut, he heard the running footsteps of his pursuers, coming closer. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear them at the top. Then the explosion of a gunshot rang out and a bullet chewed bits of metal, plaster, and paint from the doorframe beside his head. Apparently they didn’t mind waking the people here.

Gabriel ran out into the street. The Sultan Hostel was just two buildings away and he made for it at what passed in his current condition for top speed, his gait a loping, uneven thing. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His ankle wasn’t broken, he was fairly sure of that, but it felt like a knife blade was jabbing into it at every step, and the pounding he was giving it surely wasn’t helping speed the healing process.

A ten-hour flight to Sri Lanka, he kept telling himself, plenty of time to rest it, get a bag of ice from the stewardess for the swelling…

But first he had to make it to the airport and onto a plane alive.

He ducked inside the front door of the hostel just as Molnar burst out into the street. Gabriel saw him looking left and right and hid behind one of the columns in the entryway. A heavy potted plant provided a bit of extra cover—but only a bit.

Behind him, the lights in the hostel’s lobby went on. A sleepy-eyed attendant shuffled up beside him, a saucer with a flickering candle on it in one hand. “Can I help you?” he said, blowing out the candle.

“Some friends of mine are staying here,” Gabriel said, through clenched teeth. “I’ve come to see them.”

“Rather late to be dropping by,” the attendant said. “I will have to see if they—”

A hammering came at the door then, and peeking around the column Gabriel saw through the glass of the door that it was Molnar, flanked on either side by his henchmen. “Don’t open the door,” Gabriel whispered.

“What do you mean?” the attendant said, turning the knob. “Of course I’ll open the—”

A moment later, the saucer slipped from his fingers and smashed against the tile floor. The man backed up, his hands in the air, his jowls trembling. Molnar followed, the barrel of his revolver planted squarely in the middle of the man’s face. Together, Molnar and the attendant walked past the corner where Gabriel was hiding and the other two men followed, drawing their guns as they went. If any of them had looked to the side they’d have seen Gabriel—but they didn’t. He shot a glance at the still open door. He could dash out, maybe make it to the next street before they noticed…

But he couldn’t leave this guy with a gun in his face and a homicidal Hungarian itching to pull the trigger. Not to mention Sheba just a few flights up with only an eighty-year-old man and an eighteen-year-old kid for protection.

Grimacing silently, Gabriel lifted the potted plant in both hands.

The attendant looked over at him, his eyes widening at the sight as Gabriel swung the heavy stone pot up in the air. It provided enough warning for Molnar to turn and swing his gun around, but not enough for him to pull the trigger. Gabriel launched the pot at him and it caught him in the face, knocking him to the ground with its momentum. The attendant jumped out of the way as the pot landed, cracking the tiles beneath it.

The two other gunmen spun around now, too, but Gabriel was upon them, throwing a powerful right cross at the first man’s jaw and getting the second in the throat with his elbow on the backswing. Neither man was incapacitated by the blow and both brought their guns into play, one firing wildly and missing, his shots tearing up the wood of the reception desk and shattering a lamp as Gabriel ran ahead of them, the other swinging his gun like a metal extension to his fist and catching Gabriel on the side of the head with it. Gabriel reeled, fell back. He dropped into a crouch and pistoned outward with one fist, sinking it deep into the man’s gut. He could hear the forceful expulsion of breath, feel the spray of spittle from the man’s lips. Gabriel followed up with a second punch, and a third, and then the man fell before a fourth could land.

Gabriel made to stand up, but was driven forward as the second man jumped on his back. The extra weight hit his ankle just right, and he collapsed to one knee.

Before him, the other gunman lay prone, his arm outstretched on the floor. Gabriel grabbed the gun from his hand, reversed it in his own, and aimed it back over his shoulder. When he felt the barrel press against something soft that wasn’t part of his own body, he pulled the trigger with his thumb. The weight vanished from his shoulders and a low moaning began behind him.

Standing up, Gabriel limped over to the wounded man. He was leaking blood from a nasty wound in his upper chest. He still held his gun, loosely, in a trembling hand, and Gabriel bent to take it away from him. He broke it open: no bullets left. Every one of them spent on the desk and lamp. He tossed the useless gun into a corner of the room, held onto the other one.

“Who…who are these men?” the attendant said, his voice rising sirenlike as he surveyed the damage. “What did they want?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “They started following me a few blocks away.” He limped over to the bulletscarred desk, leaned his weight against it. On the stairs winding up to the second floor he saw a man creep cautiously into view, a corpulent ex-military type in a gray bathrobe. He had a white moustache, fittingly enough. “Go back to bed,” Gabriel told him. “It’s all over.”

The man cast a critical eye over the scene before him. “I hope so,” he said, his British accent icy. “I didn’t pay to be woken by gunfire and fisticuffs. If I’d wanted that I could have stayed in Brixton. Excuse me, miss.” As he climbed the stairs, hugging the wall, another figure passed him on the way down. It was Sheba, wearing an identical gray robe—they must have had them hanging in all the rooms. Who would have thought it, amenities in a place like this.

“Gabriel?” Sheba said. “You okay?”

“I’m still standing,” he said. “More or less.”

“DeGroet?”

“On his way,” Gabriel said. He took Lucy’s box out of his pocket, glanced at it. “Just a hundred fourteen miles off.”

“How do you know that…?” Sheba asked and then raised a hand, palm out. “Never mind. I’ll go get dressed. We’re in 304.” She vanished up the stairs.

Gabriel walked from one of the bodies to the next. The man he’d shot had stopped moaning; he seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. He’d live, though. The same couldn’t be said for Molnar, who’d joined his brother at last. Gabriel stopped beside the third man, who was conscious but curled up on the floor, both hands pressed to his abdomen. Gabriel aimed the gun down at him. “What did DeGroet want you to do?”

“Bring you…” The man coughed, spat a bloody wad onto the tiles. “Bring you to him.”

“Just me?”

“The woman, too.”

“Not the old man?”

“What old man?”

Gabriel nodded. Maybe now that Chios had given up its secrets, DeGroet had decided he didn’t need Tigranes anymore. On the other hand, maybe he just hadn’t told this guy about him.

“Well, tell DeGroet,” Gabriel said, “that we’re leaving the country tonight. That we’re going back to Cairo. If he’s so eager to see us, he can find us there.” When the man didn’t respond, he thumbed back the gun’s hammer. “Got that?”

The man nodded violently. “To Cairo.” He didn’t sound as though he believed it, and Gabriel knew better than to think DeGroet would—but he had to try. Maybe DeGroet would at least divert some of his men to Cairo, evening up the sides a little.

“Now get up,” Gabriel said.

“I can’t…”

“Yes you can,” Gabriel said and nudged him forcefully with his foot. The man struggled to his knees, then to his feet. His face was ashen, clammy.

When he reached the door, the man turned back. “He’ll kill you,” he said, quietly. “You know that.”

“I know he’ll try,” Gabriel said. “Now, go.”

Up in Room 304, the gray robe was on the floor and Sheba was back in her khakis and tank top. Tigranes was asleep in one of the room’s two twin beds. Christos was standing at the window, looking out at the street below.

“You think it’s safe for us to stay here?” Christos said.

“I wouldn’t,” Gabriel said. “DeGroet’s got other things on his mind now, like the treasure and the two of us, but just to be safe—” He handed Christos a slip of paper with a phone number written on it. At least it wasn’t torn from a sandwich wrapper this time. “That’s my brother’s number. Explain what you need and he’ll take care of it. Stay any place you like.” He paused for a moment. “Just not the Four Seasons.”

“Of course not,” Christos said, “that would be much too expensive—”

“That’s not why,” Gabriel said. “Oh, and tell Michael, when you talk to him, that the man you’re rooming with has the Oedipodea committed to memory. My guess is you’ll get some professional recording apparatus in the mail the next day, and a job putting it to use if you want it.”

Christos looked over at the old man where he lay. “I don’t know how he’d feel about being recorded,” he said.

“Then I hope you’ve got a good memory,” Gabriel said, “because it’s got to be preserved somehow.”

Christos nodded uncertainly.

“Listen,” Gabriel said. “What’s in that man’s head is a priceless, priceless treasure. And he knows it. When you first brought me to Anavatos, he told me about having no son to pass the poem to. He doesn’t want it to die with him. If you explain to him that you’ll be keeping it alive, that you’ll teach it to your son someday…trust me, he’ll do it.” He turned to Sheba. “You could stay, too, you know. The Foundation could certainly use a linguist working on the project. The first translator of the Oedipodea—it could make your career.”

“That it could,” Sheba said, a hint of her long-buried Irish accent coming out in her fatigue. “And perhaps it will. But I’ll never feel safe unless I know this is over. And I can’t let you face it by yourself.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gabriel said, “I can—”

“You can, you can…do you ever listen to yourself?” She came over to him, put a hand on each of his shoulders. “You’re hurt, you’re tired. You’re not going to be alone, too. Besides,” she said, “I already got us on a plane leaving in—” she glanced over at the clock on the bedside table “—forty-seven minutes.”

“You got us on…” Gabriel said. “Who has a flight leaving Istanbul at three AM?”

“FedEx,” Sheba said.

“You got us on a FedEx plane?”

“The Hunt name really opens doors,” Sheba said. “You should try it sometime.”

He gathered her up in his arms, kissed the top of her head. So much for stewardesses and icepacks—but with a nonstop cargo flight they might be able to beat DeGroet to the island, even if he flew one of his own planes.

“Sheba McCoy,” Gabriel said, “have I ever told you how impressive you are?”

“Why don’t you hold that thought,” she said. “Just till we’re safely in the air.”

Chapter 21

“You really are,” Gabriel said, “impressive, I mean,” and this time Sheba just nodded. They were sprawled in the cargo hold of a huge FedEx plane, surrounded by cardboard boxes, bulging sacks, and the occasional wooden crate, all secured in a web of plastic netting. Sheba leaned back against a stack of padded envelopes, her shoes and socks beside her, a blanket wrapped around her against the unheated cabin’s chill. Gabriel had his boots off as well and was winding an Ace bandage around his left ankle. The copilot had found it in the first aid kit mounted above the emergency exit hatchway.

The first hour of the flight had been consumed by the crew filing back, one by one, to ask Gabriel about some of his more notorious exploits, like the expulsion from Libya in 2004 and the time he’d fled Peru on horseback with half the army chasing after him. That incident had made the Times and each of them in turn wanted to know about it. But after a while the questions petered out and eventually the crew returned to the flight deck and left them alone. There was a pair of empty jumpseats they could have used but as long as there was no turbulence it was actually more comfortable sitting on the floor, and so far the flight had been smooth. They might as well have been sailing a ship over a calm ocean.

“Most people,” Gabriel said, “facing half the things you have in the past forty-eight hours, would’ve fallen apart. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.”

“Oh, I’ve seen it, too,” Sheba said. “You met my sisters. Growing up, not a one of them was worth a damn in a scrape.”

“How’d you escape turning out like that?” Gabriel asked.

“It was my dad’s decision,” Sheba said. She opened the blanket and spread it to cover both of them. “He wanted a son so badly, and he kept trying, and what’d he end up with but a house full of women? It was him, my mother and my three sisters. Finally I came along and he decided he’d had enough. So from the time I was six or seven, he’d take me out with him when he went shooting and driving and fishing and living off the land.” Sheba shrugged. “I enjoyed it. My sisters thought I was mental, and maybe they were right, but…”

“But you enjoyed it.”

“And now I know how to reload a rifle or hook up a climbing harness or change a flat tire—”

“Oh, that, too?”

“I’m a whiz with flat tires.” She snapped her fingers. “On and off like that.”

“Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Wait tables,” she said. “I’m a real bad waitress. Did it for a summer, and my god, I was awful. Made no tips.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Anything else?”

She bent over him, brought her lips close to his. “Taking no for an answer. Not getting what I want. I’m terrible at that.”

Gabriel smiled. “I’m not too good at it myself,” he said.

They landed in Kurunegala, on a private airstrip near the train depot. The town was centrally located at the intersection of the A6 and A10 motorways, within reach of all parts of the country. Dambulla was just thirty miles away to the northeast, and the spot marked on the map, Gabriel estimated, would be another ten miles or so past that.

On the way out of the plane, he rummaged through the emergency supplies cabinet by the door. Flares, life jackets, a long-handled flashlight—plenty of things that might be useful in a pinch. No ammunition for a Colt Peacemaker, though. That would have been too much to hope for.

Gabriel asked the pilot if he could grab a few things, and the pilot nodded. “Whatever you need. We’ll restock at the hangar.”

Gabriel took a couple of items, handed some to Sheba. Then he handed a cardboard box to the pilot. There’d been a rack of shipping supplies against one wall of the plane and he’d prepared the package while they were in flight. The account number he’d filled in was the Hunt Foundation’s and the address the package was going to was the Discoverers League building in New York. No point lugging two guns around when one of them was empty. And Andras had been right. The Colt was an antique, one that (the story went) had once belonged to either Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson. Who knew if it was true—but if he wasn’t going to be able to use the thing, he might as well keep it safe.

The pilot smiled as he accepted the package. “It’ll be there tomorrow,” he said. “Guaranteed.”

They stepped out into ninety-degree heat and humidity so powerful that a layer of moisture formed on their skin in seconds. It was late afternoon, so they were at least spared the glare of the sun directly overhead, but walking through the damp, warm air felt uncomfortable enough. In the distance, beneath the thrumming of airplane and truck engines, they heard a raucous chorus of chirps and caws mixed with the periodic screech of a monkey.

Kurunegala was shaped roughly like a flat-bottomed bowl, the plain the town was built on being surrounded by tall rock outcroppings the locals had named after the animals they resembled. The town’s name itself meant “Tusker Rock,” since the tallest of the outcroppings, a grim thousand-foot cliff, was said to resemble a kurune, a tusked elephant. Gabriel squinted, but he couldn’t see it. There was also a Tortoise Rock, a Goat Rock, a Beetle Rock, an Eel Rock, and a Monkey Rock, all of which looked to Gabriel like rocks. There was even (the railroad stationmaster told Gabriel in a fit of garrulousness) a Yakdessa Rock, at which point Sheba needed to translate for him since the stationmaster was at a loss to explain what sort of animal a Yakdessa might be.

“It’s not an animal,” Sheba said. “It’s a man. Like a shaman—he would help afflicted people who were possessed by Yak.”

“Possessed by yak,” Gabriel said.

“It’s the name of the Devil in Sinhala,” Sheba said.

“That certainly makes more sense,” Gabriel muttered.

He wasn’t used to not being able to speak the local language well enough to get by. Over the years he’d picked up at least a few words and phrases in most languages and was passably fluent in more than a dozen. But he’d never had the need or the opportunity to pick up Sinhala or Tamil, the languages of Sri Lanka. The one time he’d been here he’d managed to get by with a mixture of English, Urdu, and hand gestures. And pistol gestures, when he’d finally tracked down the statue. Those were understood everywhere.

He snuck a glance at the tracking device Lucy had given him, then returned it to his pocket. DeGroet was just 141 miles northwest. And closing.

“Can we use your phone?” Gabriel asked the stationmaster, a younger man no more than five feet tall who squinted up at him myopically any time he didn’t understand what he was hearing, almost as though it were his eyes that were at fault. He was squinting now. “Your telephone. We need to make a telephone call, to Dambulla.”

“Dambulla?”

“Yes, Dambulla.”

“Train does not go.”

“No, I know that,” Gabriel said. “We want to use—”

“Highway,” the stationmaster said. “You must drive.” And he made steering wheel motions with his hands.

“You want to try?” Gabriel asked Sheba.

“If they’d had telephones back when they had yakdessas,” she said, “I’d know the word for it.”

Gabriel mimed picking up a phone receiver and dialing a number, then realized that gesture might not mean anything anymore, not to someone raised on cell phones. He mimed unfolding a cell phone and talking into it. The stationmaster’s eyes unclenched happily. He reached under his counter and pulled out a phone with a scratched and faded plastic case. He opened it, pressed a button, and handed it over.

Gabriel punched in a number he remembered well from his last time here and was relieved to hear a woman’s voice answer on the third ring. “’Allo,” she said, a hint of a French accent surviving the transit through the cheap loudspeaker.

“Dayani, this is Gabriel Hunt,” Gabriel said.

“Gabriel! My goodness. How are you? Are you thinking of coming back to our island for a visit sometime?”

“Actually, I’m in Kurunegala,” he said, “right now. How would you feel about dropping everything you’re doing and driving out here to pick me up?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not sure my coworkers will like it so much, but I would feel just fine about it. Want to wait for me by the clock tower? I can be there in forty minutes.”

“I wish we could,” he said, thinking about his ankle. Taped up, it did hurt less, but it still hurt, and waiting would feel better than walking. “But we can’t. We’re going to start walking along the A6; just look for us on the side of the road.”

“Are you in some sort of trouble, Gabriel?”

“Some sort,” he said.

“Naturellement,” she said. “I’m leaving now.” And the connection broke.

Gabriel handed the phone back to the stationmaster.

“You…go to Dambulla?” the young man said. Gabriel nodded. “You go quick. Quick? Understand? Before rains come.”

“Rains,” Gabriel said.

The man squinted, searching for a word. “Later, big rains,” he said. Then his face relaxed. He knew the word he wanted.

“Monsoon,” he said.

Chapter 22

“This woman who’s picking us up,” Sheba said, and Gabriel said, “Dayani.”

“Who is she?”

They were walking along the side of the highway separating Kurunegala from Dambulla, a long, straight stretch of asphalt that cut like a knife blade through the heavy jungle cover that began in earnest just outside the town. Less than a mile from the train station, you couldn’t see anything in any direction but leaves and vines and trunks and undergrowth. That, and the occasional animal passing in your peripheral vision, the occasional car zooming past on the road.

“She’s a translator,” Gabriel said. “Spent ten years working for UNESCO out of Paris—that’s where I met her. She transferred back here a year or so ago to work on a set of documents discovered at the Golden Temple.”

“And you came for a visit to…assist her with the translation.”

“She called me to see if I’d help out when one of the Temple’s statues was stolen.”

“I see.”

“I got the statue back.”

Sheba nodded.

“What?” Gabriel said.

“Nothing,” Sheba said. “I was just thinking how strangely specific a man’s tastes can be. Some men have a thing for feet. You seem to have a thing for linguists.”

Gabriel smiled. “What can I say? I like smart women.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “And apparently we like you.”

The jungle thinned and was replaced by farmland, tidily cultivated fields stretching for miles on either side of the road. With the sky visible again Gabriel saw clouds massing heavily overhead, moving swiftly as the wind picked up. The sun was dropping and the undersides of the clouds were stained with shadow, dark russet streaks that made them look lower than they were.

When the first drops fell, it was almost a relief, cutting the heat and releasing some of the humidity. But drops were soon replaced by sheets of water pounding into the ground, a torrent that would have resembled a flash flood if Gabriel hadn’t known it was likely to continue unabated for the next five hours. He was soaked through in an instant; Sheba, too, though her jacket at least had a hood that she was able to put up. Of all the supplies they’d taken off the plane, some of which he was carrying strapped to his belt, some worn over his shoulders like a backpack under his leather jacket, some in a satchel slung over Sheba’s shoulder, none was an umbrella. And there had been one, too. He kicked himself for not taking it.

Instead, he took out a safety blinker from Sheba’s bag, activated it, and clipped it to one of the bag’s straps. It was a square plastic box that flashed a bright red light every three seconds. Even with visibility cut by the downpour, Gabriel figured it should be enough to keep strange cars from hitting them—and Dayani from missing them.

It also attracted notice from other drivers. One car pulled up alongside them and cracked the window, the driver asking in a shout whether they needed help, first in Sinhala and then in halting English.

The temptation to accept his offer was great—but they couldn’t get any wetter at this point, and since they’d been walking almost half an hour now, Dayani should be driving by any minute.

“Thanks, no,” Gabriel shouted back. “Someone’s picking us up.” He had to shout it again to make himself heard. The driver shrugged, rolled his window up and drove off.

“You’re sure your friend’s coming?” Sheba asked, leaning close to his ear.

Gabriel nodded.

“I hope so,” she said, pulling her jacket tightly around her, for what little good that did.

A moment later Gabriel pointed at a shape looming out of the gray wall of water before them. “Here she is.” He pulled a road flare from his belt and activated it, waving it overhead till Dayani’s white Indica pulled to a halt. They piled into the backseat and slammed the door shut behind them. Water ran off them, soaking the mats on the floor. They were both breathing heavily, as if they’d just come from running a footrace.

The woman in the driver’s seat turned to face them, a towel in one hand. “Here, you can use this.” She looked from Gabriel to Sheba and back again. “I only brought one.”

“That’s okay,” Gabriel said. And to Sheba: “You use it.”

“And this is…?” Dayani said.

“A friend of mine,” Gabriel said. “Sheba McCoy. She’s a linguist.”

Dayani’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, is she?”

Sheba snatched the towel out of Dayani’s hand and began drying her face and hair, which had gotten drenched in spite of the hood.

“Thank you for picking us up,” Gabriel said. He took one of Dayani’s hands, squeezed it and, leaning forward, kissed her on the cheek.

“Pas de problème,” Dayani said. “Want to tell me what’s got you in such a hurry that you’d walk through a monsoon to get there?”

“I found a map,” Gabriel said, sitting back as Dayani made a U-turn and got underway again. “Partly in Egypt and partly in Greece. It pointed here.”

“Here to Sri Lanka? Here to Kurunegala? To Dambulla?”

“To a spot maybe ten miles northeast of Dambulla,” Gabriel said. “Give or take. Do you have any idea what might be there?”

“Of course,” Dayani said. In the rearview mirror, Gabriel saw her dark brown eyes narrow. “Ten miles northeast, that’s where Sigiriya is.”

The name rang only the faintest of bells. “Sigiriya?”

“It’s an ancient rock fortress in the middle of the jungle,” Dayani said. “The locals sometimes call it Lion Rock.”

“A man named John Still discovered it in 1907,” Dayani said, speaking slowly, her attention focused on the road. “Not the rock itself, of course—that’s never been a secret. A 370-meter volcanic rock towering over the surrounding tree line, you’re not going to lose track of that. What Still discovered were the ruins on top of the rock, and the remains of some artwork on the way up—paintings, mostly.”

“Do any of these paintings depict monsters? Animals with human heads?”

“No. You mean like a sphinx?”

“Exactly like a sphinx,” Gabriel said.

“Well, most of them have been lost—the paintings were done directly on the side of the rock more than fifteen hundred years ago, and there are only twenty-two remaining out of what we think were something like five hundred originally. The ones that are left are mostly images of women—bare-breasted concubines, that sort of thing. But who knows what the ones that were lost depicted.”

“Are there any sculptures, by any chance?”

“One,” Dayani said. “Halfway up, there’s a shelf with two monumental stone paws—lion’s paws, each one taller than a man. And there’s a flight of stone steps between them, leading further up the rock. But that’s all that’s left—the rest of the figure is missing. Clearly there used to be a head there, probably made of fired clay or brick; to get to the top you’d have had to climb up into the lion’s mouth. But it’s all long gone. There’s no record of what it looked like.”

Or whether it was a lion’s mouth at all, Gabriel thought. As frightening as it might have been to ask visitors to allow themselves to be swallowed by a giant stone lion, how much more so would it have been to ask them to climb into the mouth of a man with a lion’s body?

Just the thing to set the proper tone for foreign emissaries coming to the Cradle of Fear.

“Has the site been thoroughly explored?” Gabriel said.

“Depends what you mean by thoroughly,” Dayani said. “It’s rather enormous. The upper surface has been mapped and the grounds around it, but the rock itself is riddled with caves—monks were using it as a shelter for nine hundred years before King Kasyapa ever built the palace on the top, and after his death they used it for nine hundred more.”

“Only monks?” Gabriel said.

“Why? What else did you have in mind?”

“Breeders,” Gabriel said. “Animal breeders.”

“Well, monks in Sri Lanka often did raise animals,” Dayani said.

“Not the kind I’m thinking of,” Gabriel said.

“And what kind’s that?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dayani. The less you know, the better. There are men coming here who have already killed at least nine people in pursuit of a relic of some sort that’s connected to Sigiriya. I don’t want them to have a reason to come after you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They won’t,” Gabriel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Many have died for less,” Gabriel said.

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

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

“Sorry,” Gabriel said, pulling away.

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

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

Chapter 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Gabriel said.

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

But it didn’t land on stone.

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

“Move!” Gabriel shouted. “Now!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you get stung?” Gabriel asked.

She nodded. “Hurts like hell. You?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 24

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

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

“What are you doing?” Sheba said.

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

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

Yes, there was definitely a separate block here, no question about it. The question was how he could get it out. In Giza it had taken two strong men to lever the stone slowly out of its hole—and that had been a smaller block that had already been removed and replaced several times. This one had probably never been moved since first being sealed up who knew how many centuries ago. Even if Sheba helped, they’d be at a disadvantage. And they didn’t have an unlimited amount of time. Hunching over to protect it from getting wet, he looked once more at the device Lucy had given him. 40SW, it said. Forty miles—it meant DeGroet was in Kurunegala already. Even in the rain it wouldn’t take him long to cover the remaining distance…

Gabriel froze.

He’d heard a sound, faintly, from the direction of the stairs, one that chilled him in a way that an hour spent out in the rain and wind had not. Or had he just imagined it? He looked down at Lucy’s device again. It couldn’t be—

Slap, slap, click.

He looked up—and, noticing him do so, Sheba did, too. She was still aiming the flashlight down at the stone of the lion’s paw, but enough light leaked past to outline the figures at the top of the steps. The man in front was small and slender and stood stiff-backed with a walking stick in one hand.

Lajos DeGroet.

DeGroet switched on a small flashlight in his other hand. There was a bigger man standing behind him, holding an umbrella over DeGroet’s head. To one side of DeGroet and one step back, holding his own umbrella, was Karoly, a cigarette smoldering in a corner of his mouth, a pistol in his hand.

The man behind DeGroet, Gabriel saw, had a gun on them as well.

“You look surprised,” DeGroet said.

He walked slowly down the steps, clipping the flashlight to his belt as he went.

“Do you think I am an idiot, Hunt? Did you think I wouldn’t notice that Andras’ cell phone was gone? Or that maybe it wouldn’t occur to me that you could use it to track mine?” DeGroet stopped a foot away, flanked by his men. “Have you never played chess, Hunt? I know you’re not the intellectual your brother is, but I would have thought you might have picked up some of the basic principles over the years. One of which is lulling your opponent into a false sense of security.”

He extended his free hand, palm up.

“Your gun, if you please.”

Gabriel unsnapped his holster and handed over the gun he’d taken from DeGroet’s man in Istanbul, butt first.

“Where’s your Colt, Hunt? I hope you haven’t lost it. That was a fine piece. A fine piece.” He turned the gun over in his hand a few times, then tossed it off the side of the mountain.

“How did you beat us here?” Gabriel said.

“How do I beat everyone at everything? I just do. It is my gift.” He turned to Sheba. “I am sorry we didn’t meet under better circumstances, my dear. You are a very lovely girl and I can be most generous to my friends.” He gestured at the man holding the umbrella over him. “Istvan, help Mr. Hunt get that stone out, will you? Here, I’ll take that.” He took the umbrella in his free hand. “Go on.”

Istvan slipped his gun into a shoulder holster under his jacket and knelt on the ground beside the paw. Both DeGroet’s light and Sheba’s shone on the block. Istvan felt around the edges of the seam Gabriel had uncovered, tried to slip his thick fingers inside. It was impossible—the groove was too narrow. He looked back at his boss somewhat helplessly. “How am I supposed to get it out?”

“Well, Hunt? How were you going to do it?”

“Frankly,” Gabriel said, “I hadn’t figured that out yet myself.”

“Well, figure it out now, or your lovely friend goes where your gun just did.”

Karoly took the bag off Sheba’s shoulder, transferred it to his own, and pressed the nose of his revolver into her back. Gabriel could see that his hand was bandaged. “Did that hurt,” Gabriel said, “when I shot the gun out of your hand?”

“Quit stalling,” Karoly said, his voice a low rasp.

“Oh, good,” Gabriel said. “It did.” He turned back to the block, thought about the options for getting it out. With a drill and some anchored screws it might be possible to gain purchase on the stone and draw it out; with an explosive, of course, you could blast it out. But with neither…

“Lie down,” he told Istvan. “On your back.”

“What?” the big man asked.

“On your back, next to me,” Gabriel said, and demonstrated, lying down with the soles of his boots up against the stone block.

“What are you doing, Hunt?” DeGroet wanted to know.

“We’re not going to be able to pull it out—we don’t have the tools. That means we’ll have to push it in.”

DeGroet thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Do it,” he told Istvan.

The big man lay down, braced his feet against the stone. Gabriel briefly considered the possibility of rolling over on top of him, trying to get to the gun in his holster, but he discarded the idea. Even if he succeeded in taking Istvan by surprise and could overpower him and get to his gun—none of which was a sure thing—doing so would take time, and with Karoly’s pistol millimeters from Sheba’s spine, it was time they didn’t have.

Gabriel said, “Count of three, push. Okay?” Istvan spat to clear rainwater from his mouth, then nodded. “One,” Gabriel said. “Two…”

He saw Sheba move. She spun and broke free of Karoly’s grip and started running for the stairs. DeGroet reacted swiftly: He swung his walking stick out, slipping it between her legs in midstride and, with a snap of his wrist, sweeping her ankle from under her. Sheba fell to the ground with a crash.

Gabriel jumped to his feet, but Karoly stepped forward with his gun aimed squarely between Gabriel’s eyes. “Just give me a reason,” he growled.

DeGroet stood over Sheba where she lay sprawled, her breath knocked out of her, her hair a wet heap against the stone. He put the tip of his walking stick against her throat. “Don’t do that again. Next time it’ll be my sword you’ll feel. Get up.”

Sheba climbed unsteadily to her feet. Karoly grabbed her arm roughly and pulled her to him.

“Where were we,” DeGroet said. “Ah, yes. You were counting to three?”

Gabriel looked from DeGroet to Karoly and then to Sheba. Her eyes shone apologetically. “Don’t,” he told her. “It’s all right.” He resumed his position on the ground, steadied his feet against the stone.

“One,” he said. “Two…” He looked over at Istvan, who nodded. “Three—”

He pushed with all the strength in his legs, and beside him he saw Istvan doing the same. Judging by the size of the man’s legs, he had no shortage of strength in them. The block moved—but only infinitesimally. “Again,” Gabriel said, and counted. It moved a bit more this time, sliding inward by a few inches. “One more. Kick this time.”

They both brought their knees to their chest and, when Gabriel called “Three,” kicked out, their soles landing sharply against the stone. The block slid in by half a foot or more—and then, after teetering for a second, fell inwards. There was silence for several seconds, then a large, reverberating thud that sounded like it had come from a long way below them.

Gabriel rolled over and approached the opening. Istvan was right behind him, gun in hand once more. Gabriel took his Zippo from his pocket, lit it. Inside, a corridor led along the length of the paw and deep into the rock behind it—but first there was a gaping pit, beginning an inch from the opening, and it was into this pit that the stone block had fallen. If they’d managed to pull the block out rather than push it, whoever had been the first to step into the opening would have fallen similarly.

“I need more light,” Gabriel said. He picked up the flashlight Sheba had been carrying from where it had fallen when she’d taken her spill. Shining it at the corridor’s ceiling, Gabriel saw a series of crossbeams stretching from wall to wall as well as columns supporting the ceiling. It looked almost like a tunnel in a mine, propped up to ensure stability.

The first of the crossbeams was directly above the pit.

Gabriel walked up to Karoly. “I need something from that bag. You can get it for me or you can let me get it myself—your choice.”

“What is it?”

“A coil of rope.”

“Get him the rope,” Karoly said to Sheba. “Nothing else. I see anything else come out of that bag, you’re a dead woman.”

“Understood,” Sheba said. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a hank of nylon rope.

Gabriel carried it back to the opening. It took three tries to get the end of the rope over the crossbeam and then much fishing with the middle portion of the rope to snag the far end and pull it far enough back across the pit for him to grab it. When he did, he tied a quick six-loop hangman’s knot and drew the rope tight around the beam, like a noose. He tested it with a few strong tugs. The beam held.

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Who goes first?”

They all looked at each other. Gabriel pictured DeGroet running scenarios in his head along the lines of the old missionaries-and-cannibals puzzle: If he sent Gabriel first, Gabriel could keep the rope on the far side and escape along the corridor, if he were willing to sacrifice Sheba, and DeGroet couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t; on the other hand, if DeGroet sent one of his men across first, he’d no longer have the advantage in terms of numbers back on this side of the pit…

“Ladies first,” DeGroet said, and he pulled Sheba toward the opening. She took hold of the rope, wrapped it several times around one fist, then grabbed it with her other hand as well. She gave Gabriel a concerned look, then lifted her feet and swung across. She staggered a bit when she landed and for a moment Gabriel thought she might slip backwards—but she steadied herself and remained upright. When she’d regained her balance, she threw the end of the rope back. Karoly caught it and, after pocketing his gun, followed her across.

Next came Gabriel. He tossed the flashlight across to Sheba, who shone the beam downward so it wouldn’t get in his eyes. Gabriel gripped the rope firmly and pushed off. He noticed as he swung that the crossbeam didn’t seem quite as stable as it had when he’d first tested it. But he made it safely across. When he landed, Karoly made a point of showing him that he had his gun out again and his finger tight against the trigger. “I see it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t have to wave it around.”

“Just as long as you don’t get any bright ideas,” Karoly said.

“If I were the type to get bright ideas,” Gabriel said, “I wouldn’t be here, would I?” He swung the rope back across the pit.

DeGroet caught it, handed his walking stick to Istvan, moved his grip around a bit till he got comfortable with it, and then swung across, the light hanging from his hip brushing a reflected arc against the stone wall. When he had landed, he had Istvan throw the walking stick to him. He snatched it one-handed out of the air.

Then he sent the rope back. Istvan took hold of it and walked up to the edge. He tugged on the rope a couple of times, wrapped it around one hand as Sheba had, held on with the other hand, and launched himself across.

When he’d made it halfway, the crossbeam snapped.

He vanished in a split second, plummeting into the pit. He screamed all the way down.

It took him as long to hit bottom as it had taken the stone block to fall. The sound of his impact, when it came, was quieter. That made it no less painful to hear.

“Unfortunate,” DeGroet said, after a moment. He aimed his stick down the corridor. “Now get moving.”

Chapter 25

Karoly had taken the flashlight back from Sheba and was shining it between them, lighting the path a few feet ahead. They were walking two abreast, Gabriel and Sheba in front, DeGroet and Karoly in the rear, the clicks of the old man’s stick against the stone floor punctuating their progress as they went.

The main corridor ended at an archway that led into a circular chamber, though there were other, smaller archways branching off to the left and right as well. Prodded by Karoly’s gun in his back, Gabriel walked forward.

The room was large enough that it took them some time to explore it all. There was no map on any of the walls, Gabriel noted, and no sculptures, of sphinxes or otherwise. What they did find was cages, their bars extending all the way from the rough-hewn floor to a ceiling some fourteen or fifteen feet overhead. In each there were metal shackles attached to the walls by heavy chains, the circular bands lying open and empty on the ground. Some cages had just one pair, some had two. One had three. And the walls were covered with the intricate swoops and whorls of the Sinhala alphabet, the faded ink showing dimly in the yellow beams of the flashlights.

“Please do us the kindness of translating this…this scribbling,” DeGroet said to Sheba.

“I’m no expert—” Sheba began

“Come now,” DeGroet said. “We both know that an expert is precisely what you are. I seem to recall seeing a paper of yours on Sri Lankan vowel variants in the Journal of Phonetics, and though I didn’t understand two words of it, I trust the peer reviewers wouldn’t have accepted it if its author had been illiterate in the languages it purported to analyze. Now—what does that say?” And he swung his stick to point at a passage inscribed beside the largest of the cages.

Sheba read it over twice. “It’s a…a feeding guide. It specifies a diet of one whole cow and two goat flanks daily, to be provided freshly slaughtered but not prepared in any other way.”

“Provided to what?” DeGroet said.

“It doesn’t say.”

“All right. How about this one?” DeGroet pointed out a bit of text a few cages down.

“Same thing. Only this one got goats and sheep, one of each in the morning and then again at night.”

“That’s all?” DeGroet said.

“It says they’re to be brought to the cage alive,” Sheba said.

“Not a word about what it was that would eat all these goats and sheep?”

Sheba shook her head.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“I’m not lying,” Sheba said. “That’s what it says.”

DeGroet looked around at the rows of empty cages. His face betrayed a strange mix of elation and disappointment. “It’s proof,” he muttered, half to himself. “It’s proof enough.”

“Of what?” Gabriel said. “That thousands of years ago, they bred sphinxes here? I don’t think so.”

“It’s proof they bred something, Hunt. Something big. Look at the size of those shackles. Something carnivorous, too—we know that, thanks to Miss McCoy. What do you suppose it was they were breeding?”

“I don’t suppose anything,” Gabriel said. “If I had to guess, I’d say maybe lions. Or maybe they brought some tigers over from South India. Or jackals—they have those in India as well.”

“You ever see a jackal eat a cow?”

“Actually, yes,” Gabriel said. “I have.”

“By itself? One jackal, a whole cow?”

“No,” Gabriel said, “there were a few of them, but—”

“You wouldn’t build a cage like this to house a jackal,” DeGroet said, and silently Gabriel had to admit he agreed. “And you couldn’t sell a jackal for much at all. No prince would come across the sea to buy one. No, the inhabitants of these cages were far rarer than that.”

“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “But they were not monsters. Terrible creatures, perhaps. Fierce ones trained to attack or to guard. But not crossbreeds between animals and men.”

“You are so very sure of yourself,” DeGroet said. “It must be comforting at a time like this.” He gestured toward Karoly. “Let’s go on.”

Karoly prodded Gabriel into the next room. This one seemed to have once been an antechamber of some sort, smaller than the previous room and with stone benches where the other room had cages. Between each bench and its neighbor a metal rack stood, covered thickly with dust and cobwebs and crammed with various tools and implements. In the brief glance he got as the flashlights’ beams swept past, Gabriel spotted a sort of halberd or poleax in one, with both a blade and a point at the end—the sort of thing you might use to keep a large animal at bay. He also saw what looked like a branding iron, and something else that resembled a long-armed pair of pincers, and—was that a rack of swords and armor pieces? But DeGroet and Karoly pressed them onward and the narrow shafts of light moved on as well.

In the center of the room there was a circular platform made from what looked like a single thickly varnished slab of wood, with vertical chains attached to the perimeter at regular intervals. Karoly angled his flashlight up to see what the other ends of the chains were attached to, but they receded into darkness too far above for the light to reach.

A long metal lever abutted the platform and DeGroet approached it, struck it ringingly with the side of his walking stick. “Interesting,” he said. “Interesting.” He turned in a tight circle, the light on his belt traveling along the walls. “What do you think, Hunt? If you were going to hide an ancient treasure somewhere here, where would you put it?”

“Can I ask what it is you’re looking for?” Gabriel said. DeGroet didn’t answer him. “You don’t know, do you?” He felt a jab from Karoly’s gun but he went on anyway. “I don’t think you have the faintest idea.”

“Oh, I have as much of an idea as you have,” DeGroet said, “and that was enough to bring you halfway around the world, wasn’t it? It’s a treasure—we know that. Is it a mechanical device of some sort? A religious artifact? Some physical relic of a living sphinx? No one knows. But there is no question that a treasure of some sort was taken out of Egypt and brought back here—and apparently one from Greece, too. Something precious. And powerful—very, very powerful.”

“You believe that?” Gabriel said. “This business about the power to terrify with a glance?”

“I have what you might call an open mind,” DeGroet said.

“But what would you even want with it?” Gabriel said. “Did you suddenly wake up one morning and decide you wanted to rule the world?”

“Rule the world? Me?” DeGroet laughed, a sincere, full-throated laugh that echoed against the ancient stone walls. “I’d sooner hang myself. No, Mr. Hunt, I don’t want this power for myself. I’m quite content living a life of leisure. Ruling the world would be a terrible chore.”

“Then why…?”

“I don’t wish to rule the world,” DeGroet said, “but that doesn’t mean no one does. And while some of the men who do are penurious madmen living in squalid apartments in third-world slums, with no possibility of paying someone who could help them realize their ambition, others are quite wealthy and would give a large fraction of that wealth for a treasure of the ancient world that might confer upon them the power to terrify an army into immobility.”

“You want to sell it,” Gabriel said. “You don’t even know what it is or what it can do, but you’ve decided you’re going to sell the thing to some dictator to use against his enemies—”

“Did I say ‘dictator’? That is your word, not mine. I just said he had to be wealthy, not what his politics needed to be. And if there are two of these treasures to be found, as I believe there should be, I will gladly sell the other to his opponent—let them be locked forever in a stalemate of induced terror, I don’t care. Just as long as their payments clear.”

“And if this mythical power of the sphinx is just that—mythical?”

DeGroet smiled. “Then I’ll have a pair of relics that will still fetch an excellent price at auction, won’t I?”

“You’d kill nine men for that?”

“I’d kill ninety, Mr. Hunt,” DeGroet said.

Behind him, Gabriel felt the point of Karoly’s gun jab him again. But it was no longer poking squarely into the small of his back; it was nearer to his side now—and to his elbow. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. He moved swiftly, pinning the barrel between his arm and his side. Then he wrenched his torso to the left, holding tight to his grip on the gun. Karoly howled as the metal twisted in his injured hand. The beam of the flashlight in his other hand swung wildly. The gun fired, then fired again, as Karoly desperately squeezed the trigger, but the bullets sped into darkness, hitting only the far wall. Gabriel felt the heat of the gun’s barrel through his jacket, smelled scorched leather beneath the stronger odor of gunpowder. He squeezed harder with his elbow and bent forward sharply. He heard the bones of Karoly’s wrist snap. The gun clattered to the floor.

“Run!” Gabriel shouted over Karoly’s screams and he saw Sheba dart out of sight, her footsteps speeding back toward the room with the cages. Behind him he heard the sound of DeGroet’s walking stick unlocking and the deadly saber sliding out of its metal sheath.

Gabriel raised his other arm and smashed his elbow backwards, connecting with Karoly’s face. The man fell, the flashlight tumbling from his hand and spinning across the floor, coming to a stop against the wooden platform. Gabriel bent forward and reached down for the gun—but his foot connected with it before his groping hand did, sending it skittering into some dark corner of the room.

He heard the swish of DeGroet’s blade then, flashing through the air where his head would have been if he hadn’t been bent double. He launched himself into a shoulder roll, coming up against one of the stone benches. He reached over to find the metal rack beside it. Was this the one with the halberd? No—his hand closed on one arm of the giant pincers. He saw DeGroet’s light coming near, bobbing as the man ran forward. Gabriel yanked the pincers out of the rack and swung them at the light, but DeGroet stepped nimbly out of the way and they swept through empty air. A second later DeGroet’s blade struck from the side, slicing through one leg of Gabriel’s pants and the flesh of his thigh underneath. He felt the wound open, felt blood run warm and sticky down his skin. It was his injured leg, too. He limped out of range as fast as he could, pulling over the rack behind him with a huge clatter of metal against stone. Anything to slow DeGroet down.

He staggered to the end of the next bench over and felt for the rack that should be there. Which one was this? He felt a surge of relief as his hand closed not on the shaft of a branding iron or some other bit of paraphernalia but the hilt of a sword. He drew it quickly. Ancient steel and probably fragile, not the thing you wanted most when facing a former gold medalist in fencing—but it would have to do. For good measure, he grabbed a second sword in his other hand, swinging one overhead and the other at chest level.

DeGroet loomed suddenly out of the darkness, his blade striking mercilessly toward Gabriel’s face. Gabriel parried it at the last second, the saber’s narrower blade clashing noisily against the steel of the curved sword in his left hand. He feinted with the one in his right, aiming high at DeGroet’s shoulder, and then when DeGroet angled his torso to dodge it, Gabriel changed course, tilted the blade down, and used it to sweep the flashlight off his hip. It flew through the air and smashed against the floor, leaving them in darkness.

He heard DeGroet’s blade coming and reached up blindly to meet it. The blades struck with a clang of metal against metal, and DeGroet’s slid off. Two parries in a row—Gabriel congratulated himself. Some of the finest fencers in two Olympics hadn’t managed that against DeGroet. But the second time had just been blind luck, Gabriel knew—and he couldn’t count on getting lucky again. He took several rapid steps backwards, heard DeGroet coming after him.

Neither of them could see, which negated DeGroet’s advantage in terms of pure swordsmanship. But fighting in the dark like this for any real length of time was no good. It left survival up to chance—and Gabriel had never been one to bet his life on the toss of a coin.

Orienting himself against the one light remaining in the room, he ran toward the flashlight lying against the wooden platform. If he could get hold of it, maybe use it to locate the gun…But as he got close, he saw DeGroet racing for the same spot. DeGroet saw him as well, and poured on extra speed Gabriel wouldn’t have thought the man was capable of. They stepped onto the wooden platform at the same instant.

Lit indirectly from below, the combat between the two men took on an almost dreamlike quality, their blades slashing in and out of visibility, cutting brief blazing arcs and vanishing again as they passed beyond the cone of light. DeGroet swept his sword down from above, an angled stroke of the cutting edge that could remove a man’s head; but Gabriel crossed his blades and caught DeGroet’s in the crook of the X they formed. DeGroet yanked the saber free and sent it darting at Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel sidestepped, parried with the flat of one blade and lunged with the other. The point streaked against DeGroet’s cheek and blood welled up.

“A touch,” DeGroet said grimly, raising a finger to his cheek. “It will be your last.” And he lashed out with his sword, spiraling it around the blade in Gabriel’s left fist once, twice, and suddenly the sword flew from Gabriel’s hand, yanked out of his grip by expert pressure against the blade in just the right spot.

Now it was down to one blade against one—a contest Gabriel knew he couldn’t win.

He kicked out with one foot, planting his boot in DeGroet’s midsection. DeGroet flew backwards, fetching up against one of the chains, grabbing onto it with his free hand to keep himself from falling off the platform. Before he could come back, Gabriel leaned out past the platform’s edge and took hold of the lever by its side. With a mighty heave, he pulled it toward him.

It didn’t want to move, but Gabriel left it no choice, dragging it along the channel in the floor in which it was lodged. It came, scraping with a horrendous squeal. DeGroet, meanwhile, had regained his footing and had his sword poised for another stroke—but a sound from overhead stopped them both. It was a loud grinding of stone against stone, not unlike the sound they’d heard in the chamber within the Great Sphinx, just before poor Rashidi had been chopped in half. They felt a tremor beneath their feet—and then suddenly the platform they were on lifted into the air, the chains rattling as they got forcefully yanked upwards.

Gabriel grabbed hold of one chain, DeGroet another; they both clung desperately as the platform sped through the air, the solitary light of the flashlight dwindling far below them. They were being drawn up a stone shaft at tremendous speed, as though a mammoth counterweight had been dropped from some vast height and was now plunging into whatever stygian depths Istvan had fallen to.

They couldn’t see—not just each other, but anything. Gabriel brought his sword up in front of his face and he couldn’t see the blade. The walls of the vertical tunnel through which they were rocketing might have been feet away or inches—there was no way to know, other than to reach a hand out, and Gabriel wasn’t about to try that experiment. Looking up, he saw no sign of what waited for them overhead—

But then a crack opened, a narrow line above them, lit by a concussive string of lightning strikes. It widened from a hairline to a handsbreadth and from there to a doorway’s width, two slabs of stone above them separating and tilting to either side to make room for the platform to emerge.

What had this been used for, Gabriel wondered, this primitive but effective elevator—raising beasts to the upper surface in dramatic fashion, to impress prospective purchasers?

The opening continued to spread wider and rainwater gushed down on them, the monsoon having reached its full strength while they were sheltered within the belly of the mountain.

The platform slowed, some sort of baffle kicking in. It shuddered to a halt when it was level with the upper surface. Gabriel stepped off between the chains, his legs unsteady.

The sight that greeted him in the next flash of lightning was extraordinary—all of Sri Lanka spread out below them, a thousand feet below or more, the treetops a vast furred carpet, the snaking lengths of highway and river like veins on an anatomy chart. The winds were powerful, gusting this way and that, buffeting him from behind, pushing him toward the rock’s edge. He saw DeGroet run toward him and raised his sword to meet the charge.

But it was hopeless. He parried high and DeGroet swung low, the point of his blade shredding the front of Gabriel’s leather jacket and the shirt and skin beneath. Gabriel tried to control his blade, to swing carefully rather than wildly and not give DeGroet any openings, but it was like a novice at chess playing against a master, his desperate attempts at strategy countered and foiled effortlessly.

He saw a cruel smile emerge on DeGroet’s lips as he pressed Gabriel back, back, till they were both near the edge. Glancing down, Gabriel saw they were at one of the mountain’s overhang points—no slope at all that he might roll down safely, not even a sheer face he might dream of climbing if the rains hadn’t made that impossible. Just a fall—an endless, open drop into eternity.

There was still a way out, of course. There always was. But as DeGroet teased him with his blade, drawing blood here and here and there, he began to fear he might not manage it.

“Lajos,” he shouted, his words stripped almost to silence by the rushing winds. “Lajos!”

“Yes, Hunt?”

“I know where the treasure is,” he shouted. “I’ve figured it out!” The older man’s blade darted in again, nicked a bit of flesh from the side of Gabriel’s neck.

“You know what, Hunt? I don’t believe you. And even if it’s true…I don’t care. I’ll figure it out for myself. Or I’ll pay someone to do so. I don’t need you.” And with that he sent his saber’s blade spiraling out again, as he had in the chamber far below, and swept Gabriel’s sword out of his hand. They both watched as it spun end over end into the darkness.

Gabriel whipped off his jacket and threw it at DeGroet, who batted it aside with his sword. It landed at his feet. “That the best you can do? I am disappointed in you, Hunt.”

Gabriel looked behind him—only inches remained.

“There’s no wire for you to grab hold of here, is there?” DeGroet taunted.

Gabriel dropped to his knees.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t beg,” DeGroet shouted. “Meet your death like a man.”

“Just give me a moment, please,” Gabriel said. “One moment, to say a prayer.”

“One moment,” DeGroet said. “No more.”

“And please,” Gabriel said, “when you do it…swing hard. Make it clean.”

“Oh, I’ll swing hard,” DeGroet said and raised his sword high overhead.

There is a reason they say that in a lightning storm it is unwise to be the tallest thing in sight. How much less wise, Gabriel thought, to stand atop a thousand-foot boulder in a raging thunderstorm and raise a metal bar above your head?

He knew it wasn’t possible—he knew that lightning travels much too swiftly for its motion to be seen—but looking up at DeGroet standing over him he could have sworn he saw the charge gather in the clouds, saw the forked serpent’s tongue of electricity streak down, aimed unerringly for the point of DeGroet’s saber, saw it kiss the metal with its deadly, incinerating charge.

But it couldn’t be. Not just because of the speeds involved—but because he wasn’t there to see it.

The same people who said you shouldn’t be the highest point in a lightning storm had a thing or two to say about kneeling in a puddle of water beside a man being struck by lightning, too, and none of them were good. So before he could get incinerated along with DeGroet, Gabriel kicked off, hard, from the surface of the rock and flung himself outward into space.

Beneath his leather jacket he’d been wearing one last emergency supply he’d taken off the plane, a slender knapsack, and he reached now for the metal ring attached to one of the straps. Finding it, he tugged firmly.

And behind him a compact stream of folded fabric unfurled, blossoming with a satisfying whoomp into an airtight canopy that lowered him gently through the storm.

Chapter 26

He landed where they’d begun their climb, at the foot of the mountain. As the folds of fabric pooled around him, he stripped the parachute off and squeezed between the walls of rock, beginning the laborious ascent once more. He was tired, he was wounded, he was weak—he would have liked nothing better than to make his way back to Dayani’s car and drive it to Dambulla, get help that way. But he couldn’t just leave Sheba alone in a dark cavern at the heart of a mountain fortress. And worse, she wasn’t alone. Karoly might have a broken wrist, but he might also have a flashlight—and a gun.

No, there was nothing for it but to climb, and he did, as quickly as he could without losing his footing or his grip, hugging the wall as he went. He passed the wasps’ nests, careful not to disturb them again; he passed the lacquered wall and the painted ladies; he passed the tiny cave with the bloody towel lying at its entrance. Rainwater washed his wounds clean as he went, and when twice he felt a moment of dizziness he leaned against the rock and waited for it to pass.

Eventually he made it to the lion’s paws. He staggered to the opening, waited for a lightning strike to illuminate the interior, showing him both the corridor and the gaping hole he’d have to cross to get to it. There was nothing for it—he had no rope, and the crossbeam was gone anyway. He judged the angle as best he could, got a running start, and leaped.

He landed short, his chest hitting the floor, his legs dangling into the pit. He scrabbled with his hands as he felt himself begin to slide backwards. The floor was craggy, but the crags were low and worn, and his fingers, wet from the rain, couldn’t get a solid grip.

No—

No. This wasn’t how he’d go, lost in darkness, buried beneath ten thousand pounds of stone. It couldn’t be. He bit down hard with his fingertips against the rock, squeezed till they caught hold of something, till he was hanging literally by his fingertips—but hanging all the same, not falling, not anymore. He took a deep breath, let his racing heartbeat slow for half a second, and then began the process of inching his fingers forward. After an eternity he managed to get one elbow up over the edge…then the other…then his wet and battered trunk, and finally his legs.

He rolled over onto his back, breathing heavily, his chest heaving, his eyes closed. Too close. He’d had too many close calls over the past few days, and this one may have been the worst. Or maybe it was just the accumulation that had worn him down. On a good day he would have made that jump easily.

Of course, on a good day he wouldn’t have been attempting it with a bandaged ankle and a lacerated thigh.

He got to his feet and felt his way along the corridor till he came to the branch at the entrance to the cage room. There was no light at all—and his Zippo was up on the top of the mountain, in his jacket pocket.

He opened his mouth to call out, then hesitated. If Karoly was nearby and heard him…

But what was the alternative? Blundering around in the dark?

He shouted: “Sheba!”

At first there was no answer. Then he heard footsteps running toward him, and saw a light approaching from the left-hand passageway. He backed up against the wall and raised a fist in case it was Karoly his call had attracted.

But a moment later he heard Sheba’s voice. “Gabriel, thank god,” she said, sounding every bit as exhausted as he felt—and something more than exhausted, too. Frightened? That would be natural enough. But it was somehow not just fear he heard in her voice—it was something worse.

“What is it?” he said, stepping into her path. She fell into his arms. He could feel her shaking. “Is it Karoly, is he—”

“Karoly’s dead,” she said, her words muffled against his chest.

“Then what…?”

“It was a mistranslation, Gabriel,” Sheba said, her voice more unsteady than he’d ever heard it. “You said it was the power to terrify—but it wasn’t, Gabriel, it wasn’t that at all. It was the power to petrify.”

“What are you talking about? The treasure?” Gabriel said, and he felt her chin move as she nodded. “You found it?”

“Karoly did,” she said.

“But…terrify, petrify,” Gabriel said, “what’s the difference?”

Sheba raised her head. There was a brittle edge of panic to her voice. “Petrify, Gabriel—from the Greek, ‘petra,’ meaning rock or stone. Gabriel, the sphinx’s power wasn’t the power to frighten men—it was the power to turn them to stone.”

And she swung the flashlight’s beam around.

There was a statue in the passageway, just a few feet away. It was exquisitely detailed, as naturalistic as the ones Gabriel had found in the chambers in Egypt and Greece. But this one didn’t depict a sphinx.

It was Karoly.

He was frozen in an attitude of terror, one hand flung up before his face, the other—the one with the broken wrist—dangling crookedly by his side. But his body, his clothing…

Was stone.

Gabriel ran his fingers over the surface. His heart began trip-hammering again, worse even than when he’d been dangling at the edge of the pit. “What happened? Did he touch something? Did he…did he step on something? Inhale something?”

Sheba shook her head vigorously. “I was running away. I heard him coming after me, and then a sound…”

“What sound?”

She didn’t answer. But, then, she didn’t have to. Because they both heard the sound then. It was a low, rumbling growl, accompanied by the slow padding of clawed footsteps against stone.

“Get back,” Gabriel said, taking the flashlight from her.

The footsteps came closer, then stopped, just out of sight.

“And you,” came a voice from the darkness. “Have you come to disturb my peace as well?”

It spoke in Greek. Not the modern Greek the men of Avgonyma had used—the voice had the same ring of antiquity about it that Tigranes had had when declaiming his verses of heroism and disaster.

“No,” Gabriel responded in the same tongue, “we do not wish to disturb anything.”

A shape appeared then at the edge of the pool of light the flashlight cast. The figure was low and muscular—an animal’s body. And when it moved it was with the languorous rippling grace of a jungle cat, a jaguar or a lion. But its torso rose higher than any cat’s, and the silhouette of its head was…

Gabriel gripped the flashlight tighter.

The silhouette of its head was a man’s.

“You speak the language of Olympos like a foreigner,” the sphinx said, stepping forward into the light. “Like an invader.”

It reared up, its paws extended fully. It was almost Gabriel’s height this way—and clearly many times his weight. The hair cascading over its shoulders was as gray as the fur upon its chest, and its face was lined, drawn. But its eyes were fierce and clear, their irises a piercing sapphire blue. And stretching along the creature’s back Gabriel saw a folded pair of wings.

He blinked to clear his vision, thought back to the brief moments of vertigo he’d felt climbing the mountain, the stings he’d suffered from the wasps, the hours since he’d eaten. Could he be hallucinating? But if he was, Sheba seemed to be as well, judging by the strength with which her fingers were digging into his arm from behind.

Gabriel made himself step forward. “It’s true,” he said, “that we are not from Greece. But we are no invaders.”

“You come here,” the sphinx said, its voice rising as it spoke, “you discharge your weapons, you shatter a peace of centuries, and yet you say you are not invaders! How dare you?”

“We came to stop this man,” Gabriel said, gesturing behind him, toward Karoly’s remains, “and another you’ll find dead on the mountaintop. They were the invaders—they were searching for your treasure, to use it for terrible ends.”

“My treasure? I have no treasure.” The sphinx shook its head roughly, and its hair flew about.

“Maybe you don’t think of it as treasure,” Gabriel said. “But whatever you used to…to do this.” And he gestured backwards again.

“All men have stone within them,” the sphinx said brusquely. “All living creatures do. When I wish, I bring it out. I don’t use anything to do so.”

“You do it just by…by looking at them?” Gabriel said.

“What does looking have to do with it? I could make a statue of you just as well with my eyes closed,” the sphinx said. “Both of you. Any of you! I could salt the earth with statues! I could end all of your kind at once, however many millions you now pestilentially represent. Or is it billions now, I wonder? You multiply so…”

“That can’t be,” Gabriel said. “It can’t. You can’t turn billions of people to stone.” But hearing himself say this he wondered—a day ago he’d have said it was impossible to turn even one person to stone. Was a billion less plausible?

“Don’t test me, human,” the sphinx said. “You will rue it. Perhaps I will leave you alive, the last of your kind as I am of mine, to lament to the end of your paltry days that you doubted me.”

“I don’t,” Gabriel said quickly. “I don’t doubt—”

“You lie!” the sphinx roared. It began pacing, walking in a tight circle around them. It had a musky, unwashed smell, a smell of exertion and lassitude. For all its explosive anger, Gabriel got a sense of fatigue from the creature, of extreme age and isolation.

“You lie,” it repeated. “And you must pay for it.” It leaned in close to Gabriel, its breath hot on his cheeks. “But I shall be fair. My kind always has been—we have always dealt by the rules we’re bound by, though we suffer grievously for it.

“I will pose for you a question, a simple question. It calls for a simple answer, and if you give it I will let you live—all of you. But if you do not answer, if you cannot answer, if you choose not to answer, if you fail to answer, then, human, I will let only you live—you alone of all humanity, and a world of stone to keep you company in your grief.”

“Gabriel, you can’t—” Sheba said.

“Ah, the female speaks as well,” the sphinx said. “It is unfortunate she counsels you so poorly.” It turned a baleful glare upon her. “Not only can he, he must. It is my will.”

“What’s the question?” Gabriel said, thinking of all the legends he’d read, all the stories about the Theban sphinx. There was the famous riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening, and is the weaker the more legs it has? The answer being man: the crawling infant, the erect adult, and the infirm elder. And there was its sometime corollary: What two sisters are they, the first giving birth to the second, and then the second once more to the first? To which the answer was night and day. Either of those he could answer, and he thought he could manage others of their ilk.

“The question is this,” the sphinx said. “What is my name?”

“Your name?” Gabriel said.

“My name!” the sphinx screamed, its voice echoing from the walls. “You will know my name. I will teach you my name. But—” It put a paw against Gabriel’s chest. “—only when you fail to guess my name.”

Rumpelstiltskin, Gabriel wanted to say. Your name is Rumpelstiltskin, and you can spin straw into gold…

Your name. Your name. How in God’s name, you’ll pardon the expression, am I supposed to pull the right answer out of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the almost infinite possibilities? This is no riddle! He wanted to shout it: This is a fix-up, a fraud, a pretext for slaughter!

But no—it wouldn’t be. If the beast had wanted merely to kill them it could have. If it really had the power it claimed, it could have slaughtered all humanity at any time. It needed no pretext. If instead of killing it had asked this question, there had to be a way to answer it—a clue, a hint…something. Gabriel thought back to his first glimpse of the Sphinx in Egypt, the great and terrible Abul-Hôl, looming in the night. He thought back to the inscriptions, to their talk of a divine or holy treasure, and to the statues into whose flanks they were carved—which statues, with their impossible degree of sculptural perfection, must, he now knew, have been actual, living sphinxes once. And he thought of the story Tigranes had recounted, of the Theban sphinx’s journeys and her tribulations.

And then suddenly he realized he knew the answer.

“Your name is Fear,” Gabriel said.

The sphinx stepped back, silent.

“You’re their child,” Gabriel said. “The child of the Father of Fear. What else would have been sufficient to bring the men of Taprobane on a voyage halfway around the world? No ordinary treasure would, no mere prize, no artifact. But a sphinx cub, unlawfully bred, the unlawful child of an illicit union—that they could not let alone. They came for you, they found you, and they brought you back here. You were the treasure—your father’s divine treasure, your mother’s holy treasure. And then they…what? Punished them? By turning them to stone?”

“They gave her a choice.” The sphinx’s head was bowed, its eyes downcast. “I was tiny then, a newborn practically, no more than a century and a half; but I remember it as if it were this morning. She could die, or I could.

“They told her my father had already chosen, that they’d left his body deep within his temple, at eternal rest. That he’d gone with her name on his lips. And they showed her a coin, I remember, from his land…”

Gabriel reached into his pocket and drew out the pair of coins. He held them out on his palm. The female sphinx and the amphora on one, the male profile on the other, the two facing one another in his hand.

The sphinx’s cheeks trembled as it looked from one to the other. It threw back its head and howled, tears running down its face.

“And this place,” Gabriel said, “became your cradle, this dark and terrible mountain. Have you never left it? For two thousand years?”

“Longer,” the sphinx said. “Even longer.”

“But you must leave it sometimes,” Gabriel said, “if just to hunt for food—”

“I am old,” the sphinx whispered. “I hardly hunt anymore. I hardly eat anymore.”

There was a tone of despair in its voice, a sound of finality.

“We can get you food,” Gabriel said. “I can arrange for supplies to be flow in, I can—”

“And face men each day? No. No.” It stepped back, toward the shadow. “You have given me all I need. You have shown me my mother’s face again.”

“Please, let me do something to help—”

“Gabriel,” Sheba said.

He turned to her. “What?”

“Look,” she said, and pointed.

Turning back, he saw the gray of the sphinx’s fur deepening, darkening; then he saw the skin of its face turning stiff, blank, saw the liquid surface of its eyes harden. The change crept across its body gradually, but rapidly. In seconds it was over.

Gabriel stepped forward, touched its shoulder. The stone was still slightly warm. But as he felt it, it cooled beneath his hand.

He took the two coins, stacked them, and gently slid them into the statue’s open mouth, beneath its tongue.

Chapter 27

They found a stairway, carved into the rock, that led up to the top. The climb was torment—by the end, Gabriel’s legs were burning with pain and Sheba could barely walk.

They came out into a clear night sky. The storm had passed. The stone surface glistened wetly, but the air was warm and dry.

At the far end of the rock, near where DeGroet’s body lay, a familiar helicopter stood, its door open. The pilot was by the door, talking into a microphone, and when he spotted them walking toward him, he shouted.

“Hold on—yes, hold on! I found them!”

They staggered forward.

“How did you…?” Gabriel began, but for the moment he couldn’t get any more words out.

“Talk to your brother,” the pilot said, and handed over the microphone, then stepped around Gabriel to help Sheba up into the cabin.

“Gabriel? Are you okay?” It was Michael’s voice.

“I’ve been better,” Gabriel said.

“I want you back here now.”

“Not half as much as I do,” Gabriel said. “How did you find me?”

“We tracked your signal,” Michael said.

“What…what signal? I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have…”

“That guy, Cipher,” Michael said. “He sent me an e-mail saying he’d given you a device to track someone else, right? Well, he had the good sense to slip in a transmitter going the other way so we could track you, too. Clever, right? And we didn’t even ask him to do it, he just thought of it on his own.”

Gabriel found himself smiling. He saw his leather jacket lying ten feet away, a wet and crumpled heap on the stone. Somewhere in the heap was a pocket, and in the pocket Lucy’s box was silently sending out a signal. “Very clever.”

“I wish I could thank him properly,” Michael said. “But he refused to take any money. It’s strange, dealing with someone this way. I’ve never even met the man. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

“Oh, he’s…uh…”

“What?” Michael said.

“Big,” Gabriel said, and wiped a tear out of his eye with the back of one thumb. “A big, big man. My size. Mean-looking.” He took a deep breath. “Lots of tattoos. Not your kind of guy, Michael. I think it’s better if you don’t meet him in person.”

“Well…maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “But I’m still grateful to him.”

“Me, too,” Gabriel said, climbing into the cabin. “Me, too.”

The End

From the Desk of Gabriel Hunt

When I was in Istanbul, I met a pair of writers doing research in the Yerebatan Sarayi, the Sunken Palace. One of them, I learned, was an author of adventure fiction, and when the time came for me to pen the book you’re holding, I tracked him down and asked if he might give me a hand. (I would have done it myself, gladly, but I was unfortunately tied up with some matters in Brazil at the time. And I do mean tied up.)

Happily, Charles agreed to help. And I asked him if, when the novel was finished, he might consider writing an extra adventure story of his own for the book, as a sort of bonus for the reader. Happily, he agreed to this as well.

So I’m delighted to present you with a surprise treat, a novelette that’s never appeared anywhere before: “Nor Idolatry Blind The Eye” by Charles Ardai.

—G.H.

I

The heel of the bottle cracked against the bar on the first swing and then shattered on the second. The few conversations in the room died. In the silence Malcolm could hear glass crunching under his feet. He felt his legs shake and put out his other hand to steady himself.

There were three of them, and a broken bottle wouldn’t hold them off long enough for him to get to the door. Assuming he could even make it to the door without falling on his face. There was a time when he could have made it in a dead sprint, turning over tables as he went to slow them down, but then there was a time when he wouldn’t have had to run from a fight in the first place, not if it were a whole regiment facing him. A time when he’d been able to hold his liquor, too. But that was all part of the past—the dead past, buried three winters ago in a cold Glasnevin grave.

He shook his head, but it didn’t get any clearer. He remembered coming to the pub, he remembered taking his first few drinks, and he remembered the three men taking up positions around him, reaching over his shoulder to collect their pints from the barman. Was that how the argument had started? Or had one of them said something? That he couldn’t remember. He supposed it didn’t matter.

The one in the middle was younger than the other two—just a kid, really. He was wearing a navy peajacket, probably his brother’s or father’s since he looked too young to have served himself. The others were dressed in denim windbreakers and dungarees, like they’d just stepped off a construction site. Which maybe they had—there was still plenty of rebuilding going on. The one on the left had the crumpled features of a boxer who’d taken too many trips to the mat. The one on the right looked almost delicate, his thin nose and long chin giving him the appearance of a society lad slumming in a tough neighborhood. Malcolm knew which one he’d prefer to face in a fight. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like he’d get to choose.

All three had their hands up, palms out, but it was a gesture of mocking deference, not fear. Malcolm swung the bottle by the neck and they didn’t even bother to step back.

“Go on, old man,” the one in the middle said. “Just try it.”

“Leave me alone,” Malcolm said, or tried to—the words sounded strange to his ears, like he was talking through cotton. He forced himself to enunciate. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“Bugger that,” the society boy said. “You’re bloody well going to.”

Malcolm feinted toward the boy’s face with the jagged edge of the bottle, then dodged around him. The door was open and the way before him was clear, but he felt himself stagger as he ran, felt his head spin and the floor lurch up to meet him. He fought to catch his balance and then lost it again. He fell to one knee and the bottle spilled out of his hand.

The first kick caught him in the side as he was standing up, and it laid him out flat on the floor. After that, Malcolm couldn’t say who was kicking him or even what direction the blows came from. He covered his head with one arm and tried to back up against the bar.

One boot heel caught him in the chest. By some old reflex, he snaked an arm out and pinched the foot in the crook of his elbow. He twisted violently and its owner came crashing to the floor.

“That’s it,” one of them said. Malcolm felt a fist bunched in the fabric of his shirtfront, felt himself lifted bodily from the floor and pressed back against the bar. It was the boxer’s meaty fist at his throat, the boy in the peajacket looking on angrily over his shoulder. So the society lad must be the one laid out on the floor, groaning curses into the sawdust. Well, he had taken one down, anyway.

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that,” the boxer said.

Malcolm swung a fist at him, but it was hardly a punch at all, and the man holding him deflected it lightly with his forearm. In return, he threw a right cross that snapped Malcolm’s head violently to the side. Malcolm felt blood on his cheek where the man’s ring had scraped a ragged groove, and he tasted bile when he swallowed. He tried to raise a knee toward the man’s groin, but he couldn’t—they were standing too close together, and anyway his legs felt like lead. He groped behind him on the bar, hoping his fingers would find something—a glass, an ashtray, anything—but all they found was another hand that pinned his firmly against the wood.

“Teach him a lesson,” the boy in the peajacket said. He pressed down, grinding Malcolm’s knuckles into the wood. “Teach him good.”

He felt a thumb and forefinger at his chin, positioning his head, saw the man’s fist cock back, saw it snap forward. After that, he didn’t see anything, just felt the punches landing from the darkness.

One punch split his lip against his front teeth and he gagged from the taste of blood. He felt the night’s liquor coming up and he made no effort to stop it. Vomit poured out of him, a day’s worth of food and drink expelled in foul batches. The men holding him yanked their hands away and Malcolm slid to the floor.

“Goddamn narrowback lush—” Another kick dug deep into his belly. From somewhere off to one side, Malcolm heard the click of a switchblade opening.

“Cut the sorry bastard—”

He forced his eyes open, rolled out of the way as the blade descended. It was the boy in the peajacket holding it. He swung again, and Malcolm lifted an arm to block it. He felt the blade slice through the sleeve and streak across the flesh beneath it.

“Stop that!”

It was a woman’s voice. Malcolm hugged his bleeding arm to his chest and looked for the source of the voice. A pair of legs approached, clad in nylons, a tan skirt ending just below the knee. The shoes were brown leather and scuffed, with low heels, the sort a certain type of girl would call “sensible.” On either side, a pair of paint-smeared dungarees turned in her direction.

“Leave him alone, or I’ll bring the police.”

“Stay out of this, love. It’s not your fight.”

“Oh, yes? And what do you call it when my husband is getting himself mauled by the likes of you?”

“You’re married to…this?”

“He may not be much,” she said, “but I’d just as soon not have him skewered over some tiff in a pub. Now would you be kind enough to help him up so I can bring him home?”

A tense moment passed, the blade still shining under the room’s lights. Then a pair of rough hands folded the switchblade shut. It disappeared into the long slash pocket of the peajacket. “He’s your problem, love. Help him yourself.”

“Jaysus,” one of the others said, “bird like you and an old harp like him. No bleeding justice, is there?”

“Bastard.” One of them got in a final kick, wiped the sole of his work boot on Malcolm’s shirt. Then the men’s legs went away. The woman’s stayed.

Malcolm wanted to raise his eyes, to look at the woman’s face, but his arm had started to throb and he found himself slipping in and out of consciousness.

The stockings took two steps forward, skirting the smear of filth beside him. The woman lowered herself to a crouch. The light was behind her and Malcolm could only faintly make out her features. She had a sharp widow’s peak and fair skin, and the largest, saddest eyes he could remember seeing.

“You’re Malcolm Stewart?” she said.

He nodded. She looked as though she’d been hoping he’d say no.

“Look at you,” she said. “I can’t take you to him like this.”

“To whom?” he said. He felt dizzy. “Do I know you?”

“My employer. He asked me to bring you to him. He has—” She paused to look him over again, and the disappointment in her voice was undisguised when she spoke. “He has an assignment for you, Mr. Stewart.”

“…an assignment?”

“I told him it wasn’t a good idea. I told him the reports he had were years old. But Mr. Burke’s not one to be put off.” She took him by his undamaged arm, pulled him not too gently to his knees. “Come along, Mr. Stewart. Let’s get you bandaged up and bathed, what do you say?”

“I say,” he mumbled, trying to think of the words. “I say ‘thank you’?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a start.”

The iodine stung and the bandage smarted. He’d burned his tongue on the coffee she’d given him, and his chest was erupting with colorful bruises. His head was still ringing. But he’d showered (carefully, leaning against the wall) and he could feel sobriety returning to him, timidly, like a husband tiptoeing back into the house after an evening’s debauch.

“Have you got a name?” he said. “Or would you rather I just thought of you as an anonymous benefactor?”

She was watching him from one of the bedroom chairs, legs crossed primly at the ankles, hands laced in her lap. She had an admirable figure and a face just this side of beautiful. And she was young, too—still in her early twenties, Malcolm guessed, which would make her less than half his age. He could understand why the lads in the bar might have had a hard time picturing them as man and wife.

“My name is Margaret Stiles. But that’s not important. Only Mr. Burke is, and what he wants to talk to you about.”

“And what is that?”

“He’ll want to tell you himself.”

“I see.”

“Please choose a shirt and get dressed,” she said. “We shouldn’t keep Mr. Burke waiting.”

There were three shirts laid out on the bed. Malcolm selected the softest of them, a red flannel, and drew it on over his bandaged arm. He winced as he buttoned it.

He was still wearing his own pants—they hadn’t been spattered as badly. And the boots were his as well. A quick dunk under the tap had restored them to whatever prior vitality they might have claimed. His shirt had been ruined. He imagined it was now being incinerated in some hidden chamber of this house.

“Your Mr. Burke knows I’m here?”

“I spoke to him while you were in the shower.”

“And he wants to see me now?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Why ‘in a manner of speaking’?”

“Come on,” she said, standing up. “We’ve lost enough time.”

“I want to know what you meant. He doesn’t want to see me?”

“I imagine,” she said, “that he would like to see you more than anything. But that’s hardly an option.”

“Any why is that?”

“His eyes, Mr. Stewart. He was blinded in North Africa.”

North Africa. The words brought a rush of painful memories. The press toward Libya, the desert winds in his throat, the baking heat, and in the middle of it all, between spells of tortured boredom, the moments of utter chaos: the mortar rounds tearing great gouts out of the sand, and out of the men who sped across it. So Burke had been an 8^th Army man? And had paid for it dearly, though not so dearly as some.

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. “I was in that campaign myself.”

“I know you were,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons he selected you, though perhaps he’ll think better of it once he meets you.”

“That’s rather harsh, my dear.”

“Harsh? Look at you. And what he’ll ask of you, Mr. Stewart…it’s ever so much worse than dealing with those three in the pub.”

“I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Yes, but recently?” She waited, but he had no answer for her. “Now will you please follow me?”

He stepped out into the hall. She led him down to the main floor on a staircase wide enough to hold four men abreast. The building was deceptive: From the front as they’d come in it hadn’t looked nearly as big as it turned out to be once you were inside. There was money behind this Burke, generations of it. It didn’t show in ostentatious ways—no chandeliers dripping with crystal or gold leaf on the picture frames. But the pictures themselves looked like they’d fetch a pretty sum at auction, and the carpeting was the sort that costs as much as most people spend to furnish their entire homes.

They passed from the entry hall into a library, and on through a short connecting corridor into the kitchen, where a woman in a cook’s smock stood cutting potatoes into a copper kettle. She looked up as they passed. He thought he spied a look of pity in her eyes.

“Another, Miss Stiles?”

Margaret moved them along without slowing.

Malcolm looked back over his shoulder. The woman was still watching, knife at the ready, supper temporarily forgotten.

Malcolm didn’t say anything till they were out of earshot. “What did she mean, ‘another’?”

“Never mind her.” Margaret stopped at a closed door. She tugged on a brass pull set into the doorframe at eye level. He could hear a bell ring within and, moments later, a man’s voice called out. “Miss Stiles?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got Mr. Stewart with you?”

“Yes.”

“Bring him in.” It was a deep voice, muffled by the door, but strong, Malcolm thought, and self-confident. He was put in mind of his commanding officers from the army—it was the sort of voice you were trained to use when marshalling troops for a charge across a noman’s zone. Some men didn’t need to be trained, of course. They’d learned it in the nursery or had it bred into them from birth.

Margaret swung the door open. He was surprised to see no light behind it. She made no move to turn one on.

“Come in, Mr. Stewart,” the voice intoned. “Don’t let the darkness bother you. Miss Stiles will show you to a chair.” She took him by the arm and steered him through the room, navigating obstacles he could see only dimly. It was oddly damp in the room, as though a window had been left open, but the only windows he could make out appeared to be shut and heavily curtained.

“It’s for my eyes, you understand,” Burke said. “Dark, cool, moist—I’m afraid it’s the only way for me to be comfortable any longer.”

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said.

“Come,” Burke said. “Sit by me, and Miss Stiles will join us.”

She put his hand on the arm of a chair, and he sat. Now that his eyes had begun to adjust, Malcolm could make out the outline of Burke’s face where he sat two feet away. He wore a beard, and his hair curved up from his forehead in uneven curls. The man leaned forward with his left hand out. Malcolm took it. Burke’s grip was firm.

“What happened?” Malcolm said. “To your eyes, I mean. Shrapnel? Or fire?”

For a moment, Burke didn’t say anything, and Malcolm thought perhaps he’d crossed a line. But for Christ’s sake, the man had brought the subject up himself. And after all, hadn’t Malcolm served in the same campaign, hadn’t he seen plenty of friends lose eyes and worse—?

“No,” Burke said. “Not shrapnel, nor fire, nor any of the other causes you’d imagine. I’ll tell you what happened, Mr. Stewart, but that is the end of the story, not the beginning. Miss Stiles, could you turn up the fan? Thank you.”

Malcolm heard Margaret’s footsteps retreat and return. A mechanical hum he hadn’t noticed before got louder, and he felt the air stir.

Burke leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. Malcolm could see he wasn’t wearing anything over his eyes—no dark glasses, no patch. He didn’t seem to blink, either. Of course, perhaps he had glass eyes…but no, that wouldn’t explain the need to sit in the dark and keep things as damp and cool as a cellar.

“Mr. Stewart, I want to thank you for hearing me out. I need your help. Or to put it another way, I need the help of someone who knows his way around a part of the world I understand we have in common. Someone who’s not easily frightened or put off the scent. I’ve asked around and people think highly of you.”

“You must not have asked anyone in town,” Malcolm said. “You’d have gotten a different picture.”

“Yes, Miss Stiles told me about the scene in the pub. Most regrettable. You drink too much, Mr. Stewart.”

“Or not enough.”

“More and you’d be dead of it, and no use to me. Let’s not fence with each other, shall we? You were a good man once. I heard it from men I trust. Until your wife died, I gather, and since then it’s been one long bender, hasn’t it?”

Malcolm flinched. “Not so long.”

“Three years, man. And you once a good soldier. Where’s your backbone?”

“I left it behind in the sand,” Malcolm said, “where you left your eyes.”

“Nonsense. You’ve still got a spine, man, you’ve just let it soften in that embalming fluid you insist on pouring into yourself. If you’re to work for me, you’ll do it dry, you understand?”

The voice of command—Malcolm almost felt himself sitting up straighter in response, against his will. “And am I to work for you?”

“I hope to god you are—I’ve exhausted everyone else.”

“What is it you want done? I don’t see you as the type to raise a private army, and I’m out of the soldiering business anyway.”

“No. I’ve never been a soldier myself. What I have been—what I am, Mr. Stewart—is a student of history. When I went to North Africa it was not because of the war but in spite of it. I wasn’t part of the military action, I was there on my own, pursuing one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world.”

“Greatest mysteries of the ancient world”? The man sounded like a radio program. But he had a job to offer, apparently, and such offers were not plentiful these days.

“I understand,” Malcolm said. “You were in Africa hunting something, but instead of finding it, you came across the military action instead?”

“No, Mr. Stewart. I found what I was looking for. I found it exactly where I thought it would be. I saw it with my own eyes. I’d searched for a decade and more, and by god, I found it.” He fell silent.

“What happened?” Malcolm said.

“Some antiquities, Mr. Stewart, are hidden by time alone—a cave’s entrance is covered in a sandstorm and forgotten, and no one sees its contents again for a thousand years. But others are kept hidden deliberately, passed from generation to generation in secret. The price for learning the secret is a vow to preserve it, and the penalty for revealing it is death. It is antiquities of this sort that are the harder to find. They aren’t lost, you see, and the people who know where they are have an interest in keeping them from you.”

“But you did find…whatever it was.”

“I did, and I did it the hard way. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was a stronger man than you, and faster, and better with a gun. I knew what I was after. I hunted it and the men who kept it, I hunted it through nine countries on three continents, and I found it, Mr. Stewart.” His voice broke. “I found it. But I couldn’t keep it. They caught me, and for several days they held me while they discussed what to do with me. Then they cut off my right hand—I’d touched it with that hand, you see. And of course I’d seen it, Mr. Stewart. I’d seen it.”

Burke leaned over the side of the chair and pressed a switch on the desk beside him. A shaded light went on—low wattage, but enough to illuminate one side of Burke’s face. The other side remained in shadow until he turned to face Malcolm full-on. Burke’s eyes were wide open and leached of all color, only the faintest outline of concentric circles to hint where pupil and iris had once shown.

“They cut off my eyelids, Mr. Stewart. With the sharpest of knives, and gently, so gently, holding my head so I couldn’t scream or injure myself. They wiped the blood from my eyes with silk. With silk, Mr. Stewart—I’ll never forget the touch. Then they carried me out into the desert west of the Gattara Depression, left me in the Great Sand Sea, completely naked, left me to go blind and mad and then die—and I would have, surely, if I hadn’t been found by a pair of soldiers from a British regiment who had wandered off course. They saved me from madness and death, Mr. Stewart. But it was too late to save me from blindness.”

He switched off the light, but the image of the lidless, sun-bleached eyes hung between them. “The touch of light is quite painful still,” he said. “But I wanted you to see. There should be no mystery between us.”

It took a moment for Malcolm to find his voice. “What is it that you want me to do?”

“I’ve found it again,” Burke said. “It has taken me years, and more money than you can imagine. It’s cost several good men their lives. But I’ve found it, and this time it won’t get away from me. Not with your help.”

“And why should I help you?”

“There will be money, of course—quite a lot. But I know what you’re going to say: Of what use is money if you’re not around to spend it? And that’s so. But there’s more. This is your chance to be a part of something much greater than yourself, greater than me, greater than all of us. You will play a role in unraveling one of the greatest unsolved riddles of all time.”

“Is that what you told the other men? The ones who died helping you?”

“Yes, Mr. Stewart, it is. It was the truth.”

“And they took the job.”

“I pay extremely well. And the men I chose had something in common with you.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing to lose,” Burke said.

It stung, but only because it was true. He had no family and no employment. His army pension kept his glass full as long as his tastes were cheap, and occasional under-the-table assignments paid the rest of his bills. He’d fetched and carried for some of London’s worst, had ridden shotgun for questionable deliveries, had taken part in labor actions on whichever side cared to have him. It was a life, but only in the barest sense. Even when he’d had reason to, he’d never shrunk from risking it. Why would this be the assignment to make him put his foot down at last? And yet the image of Burke’s lidless eyes was a hard one to rid himself of.

“Tell me, Mr. Burke, what it is that I’d be collecting for you, and how much you would pay me for it.”

“I’d pay enough that you’d never need work again,” Burke said.

“If you please, I’d prefer a number.”

“Fifty thousand pounds, or its equivalent in any currency you choose. Gold, if you like.”

Malcolm’s mouth went dry. “You can’t be serious. What are you asking me to do, steal the crown jewels?”

“Oh, something much more valuable than that. Do you remember your Bible, Mr. Stewart?”

“Not too well.”

“There’s a story in it about a man called Moses,” Burke said. “You may recall he went up into the mountains for forty days, leaving his people behind. We’re told they grew restless, that when he didn’t return as promised, they called on his brother, Aaron, to make them an idol to protect them. A figure of a calf fashioned from the melted-down gold of their earrings and wristlets and such. When Moses returned and saw them worshipping this golden calf, the Bible says his anger was terrible. He smashed the tablets he was carrying, ordered the calf destroyed—ground to powder—and then mixed the powder with water and made his people drink it.”

“And?”

“Like most of what’s in the Bible, there are elements of historical truth to this story, but there is also much that’s unreliable. Moses existed, surely, and so did the golden calf, and when he saw the thing being venerated at the foot of Sinai, it’s very likely he did order it destroyed. Perhaps he even thought it had been, that the powder he was forcing down his people’s throats was the residue of its destruction. But he was just a man, after all, and easily deceived.

“The golden calf was not destroyed, Mr. Stewart. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it, I’ve held it in my hand. For three thousand years, it’s been hidden, preserved by a priestly sect that moves it from place to place at two-year intervals. They’ll kill any outsider who gets close to it. They tried to kill me, and they’ll try to kill you. But they won’t succeed—not if you’re as good as people say.”

“I was once,” Malcolm said.

“And you shall be again. No more wine, man. You have a job to do.” Burke extended his hand again, his left hand, and Malcolm watched it hang in the darkness, drawing him into a covenant that could cost him his life or worse.

Lydia, he thought, if you were here, I’d spurn the offer and not think twice. But you’re gone, my darling, in heaven or in sod, and I’m left behind to end my days alone. What harm if they end quickly?

He took Burke’s hand, felt it tighten around his own.

From the darkness, he heard Margaret’s breath catch and felt a flicker of anger. She was the one who’d brought him here. What had she expected him to do?

Malcolm strode purposefully through the rooms, retracing their steps to the entry hall. Margaret had to run to keep pace.

“So, how many of us have there been?”

“Four. Unless you count the ambassador. He refused the offer.”

“Probably the only time anyone has refused that man anything.”

“He’s a great man, and he’s suffered greatly,” Margaret said.

“And made others suffer.”

“He’s not made anyone do anything. He’s offered the opportunity—”

“Four men have died chasing his opportunity.”

“Then why did you say yes?” She wheeled on him and grabbed his arm. “No one forced you to.”

“Maybe I just want the money.”

She held his eyes, searched in them for something.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think you expect to see the money.”

“Well, then, maybe I just need something to do, something that will get me out of this town.”

She shook her head.

“So tell me, Miss Stiles, why am I doing it?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s because you recognize the importance of what he’s discovered. But I don’t think that’s it at all. I think maybe it’s the danger that attracts you. I think maybe you want to die.”

“You’re wrong,” Malcolm said. “If that’s what I wanted, this city’s got no shortage of roofs to jump from.”

“And pubs, where you can get yourself stuck by a boy with a knife.”

“I didn’t start that fight,” Malcolm said.

“None of you ever starts a fight. But somehow you end up in so many. And eventually one of them’s the death of you.”

“Eventually. But not today.”

“Only because I was there.”

“And I’ve thanked you for it,” Malcolm said.

“Who will you thank in North Africa, Mr. Stewart? When you’re crossing the Jebel Akhdar, who will you lean on for support?”

“Maybe you’ll come with me,” he said, with a small smile. “And watch my back for me on the Jebel Akhdar.”

She released his arm and he started toward the front door. She called out after him.

“You know what the difference is between you and the other four?”

He looked back. “What.”

“They had a chance,” Margaret said.

II

He needed a drink in the worst way. It wasn’t just the heat, nor the deprivation—he’d gone without for longer when he’d had to. It was the touch of the familiar he yearned for. A bit of the house red might have dimmed the sun and cooled the air; most of all, it would have made the place feel less alien.

Six years had gone unnoticed here. The flags of the Reich were gone, but no new standard had taken their place—the few flagpoles still standing were bare. The harbor hadn’t been enlarged: two ships of modest size still filled it to capacity. And bullet holes of various vintages scarred the walls of every building, silent reminders of the place’s violent history.

Malcolm carried his bag into the center of town, waved off the attempts of two locals to take it off his hands for a couple of dirham. The papers Margaret had given him directed him to the hostel by the souq, and Malcolm picked his way to it through the crowded, listless streets. There were tradesmen bargaining, displaying their wares from hooks driven into the walls a century earlier. Reed baskets and hammered metal copils, cloth woven with traditional Arab motifs hanging side by side with war booty, bits of parachute silk and laceless boots, bayonet blades brown with rust and blood. Who would buy these things, Malcolm wondered, and with what money? But the merchants were there, and they didn’t look like they were starving.

He palmed some folded dinars to the man behind the front desk at the hostel and was taken to a third-floor suite. The bed was low to the ground, and other than a mat and a basin the room had no furnishings, but it would do. It would have to. At least the elevation put it off limits to all but the more adventurous burglars—there was no balcony outside the window, and a thirty-foot fall to the cobblestones would end a man’s career even if it were not fatal.

The call of the muezzin sang out and Malcolm closed the shutters of the window to muffle it. He’d have to get used to it—he’d be hearing it five times every day. But he was still tired from his trip, his healing arm was still sore, and he figured he could start getting used to it tomorrow.

He unpacked his revolver, wiped it down, sighted along the barrel and practiced firing a few times before loading it and sliding it into the holster on his hip. With his jacket on, all but the bottom of the holster was covered. Anyone looking for it would spot it, but a casual passer-by might not.

He folded Margaret’s tidy pages of notes and tucked them into one of his shirt’s breast pockets. He’d committed the information to memory during the crossing, but these names—he couldn’t always remember which was the person’s, which the street’s.

The currency Burke had supplied went into his other breast pocket. Malcolm buttoned this one closed.

The rest? His clothing could stay here. It would be pawed through by the management, but as long as they expected another night’s stay from him, they’d be unlikely actually to take any of it. He slung a small leather satchel over his shoulder and around his neck. The two paperbacks he’d brought as shipboard reading he wrapped in one of his shirts and shoved to the bottom of the bag. One was the new James M. Cain, the other a copy of the Christian Bible, and both would excite comment if left lying around.

Finally, he unfolded the crushed Borsalino he’d bought just before leaving, patted it back into shape. Every soldier knew you couldn’t get by in the desert without a decent hat. It didn’t have to be a Borsalino, but for god’s sake, it was Burke’s money he was spending, this might well be the last hat he’d ever own, and damn it, he’d bought the Borsalino.

He put it on and headed down to the street. He didn’t bother to lock the door.

Dr. Ettouati’s rooms were in the old quarter, where the buildings were smaller and the streets tighter. Standing with your arms out, you could almost touch the walls on either side. Malcolm consulted the notes, tucked them back into his pocket, and made his way to the building Burke had named.

It was a low, terraced building done in the Andalusian style, with rounded arches supported on the backs of narrow columns. There were fewer bullet holes here, and fewer people. One old woman watched from a nearby corner, leaning on a whisk broom she’d been using to stir the dust between the cobblestones. He felt her eyes on him as he climbed the exposed staircase to the building’s second story.

The doctor came to the door wiping his hands, and wiped them again after closing it behind them. He was a short man, no more than shoulder height to Malcolm, but solid, as though he’d be awfully hard to tip over. Malcolm was reminded of the statues he’d seen in Derna’s museum when he’d passed through in ’43, the heavy-featured stone guardians and gods, carved and unmovable.

“Burke wired me to expect you. You are the American, eh?”