Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

Gabriel hated cell phones the same way he hated most modern technology—but that didn’t stop him from feeling compelled to answer the thing when it rang. He fished it out of his trouser pocket and brought it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Gabriel?”

“Michael?”

Gabriel immediately pictured his younger brother sitting at his desk back in the luxury of his clean and comfortable New York office. He’d rarely envied his brother his stay-at-home life—but at this moment he came close.

“Are you sitting down?” Michael asked.

Gabriel grimaced. “Not precisely.”

“It’s Lucy, Gabriel.”

The urgency in Michael’s voice gave him pause. Lucy—short for Lucifer—was the youngest sibling in the family. Their imaginative parents had named each child after one of the archangels in the Bible. It didn’t seem to matter to them that their daughter would have to bear the ignominy of her moniker for the rest of her life. In an attempt at kindness, her brothers had called her Lucy, but in the years since she’d run away from home at age seventeen, she’d taken to calling herself “Cifer” instead. Pronounced like cipher , it made a fine name for the scofflaw computer hacker she’d turned herself into.

“What about Lucy?” Gabriel asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“No , Michael, I’m not sitting down! Just tell me!”

“She’s in terrible danger. You need to come back to New York as quickly as you can.”

“How is she in danger?”

“It looks . . . it looks like she’s been kidnapped.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard Michael correctly. “Say that again?”

“She’s been kidnapped .”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And there’s a ransom demand.”

“How much do they want?”

“They don’t want money, Gabriel. They want you .”

Chapter 2

Gabriel tapped the intercom button outside the Hunt Foundation to announce his arrival, unlocked the front door, pocketed his key, and stepped into the foyer. The room was full of artwork, antiquities displayed in glass cases, and brochures about the organization for the rare occasions when some museum curator or endowment representative might visit the building. The rest of the ground floor consisted of a dining room and kitchen, a small library (the larger one was on the second floor), and one of Michael’s offices, where Gabriel was headed.

The brownstone, located on East 55th Street and York Avenue, overlooked the East River and was designated as a landmark. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had lived and worked there, raised three children there, and left it in trust to the Foundation in their wills, which had been triggered when they’d vanished at sea at the turn of the millennium. Michael, being the responsible one in the family, was legally appointed the manager of both the trust and the Foundation. That was perfectly fine with Gabriel. The less he had to deal with paperwork, taxes, endowments, grants, bills, and bureaucracy, the happier he was. He did find it handy to have money—you couldn’t mount international expeditions the way he did without it—but he had no interest in the management of the various accounts and funds. Michael was a superb administrator and Gabriel knew such things were better off in his hands.

“There you are,” Michael said as his brother stepped through the office door. The room was spacious, containing a pair of antique trestle tables, a gorgeous nineteenth-century mahogany desk, one wall lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets, and two more lined similarly with packed bookshelves. What generally irritated Gabriel was how organized and uncluttered it was. And normally Michael’s appearance matched the room’s: tidy, neat, unruffled. At thirty-two he was quite the opposite of his older brother. Where Gabriel was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, ropy, and apt to show up with stains from smoke or grease or blood on his clothing, Michael was slight and bookish, wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and was never seen with a strand of his thinning, sandy hair out of place. Except for the thinning hair, he hadn’t changed much since he was a boy. Gabriel had spent a fair portion of their childhood protecting Michael from neighborhood bullies, in neighborhoods all over the world, and not one of the encounters had discomposed Michael in the slightest.

But he was discomposed now.

“Talk to me,” Gabriel said as he dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t look good. I received an e-mail from an anonymous account. I printed it out.” Michael handed it across the desk. Gabriel took it.

TO: MICHAEL HUNT—HUNT FOUNDATION

THE ALLIANCE OF THE PHARAOHS INFORMS YOU

THAT WE HAVE LUCIFER HUNT. DO NOT CONTACT

POLICE. DO NOT CONTACT FBI. YOUR SISTER WILL

DIE IF YOU DO. WE REQUIRE THE SERVICES OF

GABRIEL HUNT. HE SHALL MEET OUR REPRESENTATIVE

ALONE, REPEAT ALONE, IN CAIRO.

The message went on to designate the time and place of a rendezvous three days in the future. At a stall in a public bazaar.

“After nine years, Gabriel!” Michael snatched the paper from Gabriel’s hand and waved it in the air. “Nine years we don’t hear from her, we don’t know if she’s alive or dead, and then this.”

Actually, Gabriel knew, Michael had heard from her a few times—but only over the Internet, under her “Cifer” pseudonym, which Michael assumed belonged to a thuggish, unsavory male who eked out a living skulking around the alleyways of the online underworld. It was an impression Gabriel had not disabused him of, even after learning the truth himself.

“My god, Gabriel. If they hurt her—”

“Do we know anything about this Alliance of the Pharaohs?” Gabriel asked.

“I spent the last twenty-four hours going through everything we have on Egypt. There’s no mention of the group in any of the books we have, nothing in any of our files. The best I could do was a few hits on the Internet.”

“And?”

Michael ran his fingers through his hair anxiously. “In the last two years, there have been two instances of Egyptian artifacts being stolen from major museums. The more recent was from the Louvre, in Paris. The French police attributed the crime to an ‘Alliance Pharaonique .’ Another theft occurred in Istanbul a year earlier; Interpol isn’t sure they’re related, but the items stolen in both cases were from the same period. We’re talking ancient Egypt—solid gold jewelry supposedly worn by Ramses II in Turkey, a goblet dating from Cleopatra’s reign at the Louvre.”

“That’s all we’ve got?”

Michael turned his hands palm up and the furrows on his forehead deepened.

“Great,” Gabriel said. “So we know they like Egyptian artifacts, which we might have been able to guess from their name. And we know they were able to find Lucy, despite her best efforts to stay hidden.” Gabriel didn’t mention that he’d met with Lucy a handful of times over the past few years himself, once in this very building—no reason to make Michael feel worse than he already did. Besides, in each of those cases it had been Lucy who had found Gabriel, not the other way around. “What I don’t understand is why they’d kidnap her just to get me to meet with them. Couldn’t they just make a phone call? We take appointments, don’t we?”

“They’re criminals,” Michael said. “I mean, if these are the same people responsible for those museum thefts. And if you’re the sort of person who does that, you’re probably perfectly comfortable kidnapping young women and probably don’t like to do things through ordinary channels . . . Gabriel, what are you doing ?”